Letter Reflection

Today, I joined a wonderful Interintellect salon.

Together we will look back on what this year has brought and write a letter to our future selves. Guided prompts and open conversation will help us notice what we want to leave behind and what we want to carry forward.

There are a few notable things that appeared in my letter-to-self that I wanted to give a bit more space to.

Giving and Receiving

It’s so easy to ask yourself what you want. Despite how natural the question feels, it hides a rich complexity and you often see people twisting themselves in knots to provide a coherent answer.

As someone who thinks mostly in a visual language, I’ve tried to generate responses by creating new language patterns and observational strategies that feel hi-res.

I once dated someone who articulated it nicely. She was playfully poking fun at the way I speak, and to illustrate more concretely, she pointed at a tree outside our window and said, “It’s just so weird because you’ll be like ‘see the third branch up on the right side of that tree? That’s what I want my math class to be like’ and I just don’t know what the hell that means or how to engage that.”

I knew I sometimes spoke like this, but it was odd to have it reflected back to me. Since that time, my trust in “what do I want?” answers has eroded.

That trust reached an interesting nadir while I was writing earlier today. I noticed myself falling back into the typical retrospective analysis of desire, but perhaps as a result of my recent foray into semantics, I started seeing all the implicit assumptions in the phrase “I want”.

Notably, it is about receiving. The implied extended question is something like, “What do I want to receive from life?”

What would happen if I instead asked what I want to give to life?

I’ve gotten most of what I’ve asked for from the universe, but have I given all of what I’ve wanted to give?

What would my days looked like by asking what I want to give today instead of asking what I want to receive or feel (another form of receiving)?

It seems more generative. I’m gonna tug on that thread for a bit and see what unravels.

Love and Avoidance

One of the ways to narrativize my year is to tell a story about awakening to things I’d been reluctant to face. It’s a classic tale of knowing something but not understanding it until a new reality is thrust upon you. For example, if you had spoken to me a year ago, I would have proselytized the mundane and told you about how all great things were built from the same fundamental parts, and that the banal holds the key to a vibrant existence.

It was easy to say at that time, but I had no idea what I was talking about.

But now after a tumultuous year, I’m beginning to See.

If you love something, you have to love all of it. Otherwise, there grows a distance between you and the object of your love that eventually corrodes one of the two. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to like everything, but you have to love everything.

To love something is to be attentive to its truth. That truth is not only found it in the object’s current form, but in all the potential forms it could take, and in the constantly changing picture of what it manifests in each moment.

Love epitomized is the connection between two entities created by the apprehension of this complete picture. The fuller and more detailed the picture, the deeper the connection, and therefore the deeper the love.

I realized today while writing that my most important non-human love affair, the one between me and existence itself, had been suffering from my reluctance to look at critical elements of its character. I’ll save the specifics of what I’d been avoiding for another time.

Closing

I’m fortunate to be able to say that I’m excited about the next year. There is a lot more reflection to do, but each December I’ve been able to look back and see remarkable growth.

Wherever it makes practical sense, I’m going to try reorienting my desires around what I want to give, rather than what I want to receive, and I’m going to start looking at the Hard to Look At so I can better love the gift of life.