An Existential Guide to: Standing at the Edge of Your Own Life

A very happy New Year to all of you dear Folks!

The Dog - Francisco Goya - c. 1819–1823

Fear doesn’t arrive like an alarm. It seeps. It shifts. It fogs the edges of things. It convinces you that what you’re standing inside of is provisional, a draft version of reality, not yet the real thing . As if life will begin later, once the conditions are right. Once the lighting improves. Fear doesn’t want to stop you; it wants to hire you as its full-time archivist.

You wake up inside a day that does not announce itself. No title card. No swelling music. Just the weight of your own name settling back onto you, the quiet obligation to be whoever you were yesterday. Fear loves this part. Fear thrives on continuity. It wants yesterday to keep renewing itself indefnitely. The mind is a time traveler that only visits catastrophes.

The strange thing is that nothing you imagine later has any texture. Futures are always smooth and ghostly. You can’t grip them. They don’t resist. By contrast, the present is abrasive. It catches - scrapes your knees - smells like damp concrete and overheated wires. That’s how you know it’s real. Your future is a ghost, whispering promises and threats with the same cold breath.

Most lives are built not out of desire but out of avoidance. Not because people are cowards, but because avoidance is efficient. It looks like inteligence. It keeps the system running. You don’t choose what you want; you choose what won’t immediately punish you. You learn to call this maturity. Anxiety is the interest you pay on a disaster you’ve borrowed.

There is a particular sadness reserved for paths chosen because they made sense. Sensible paths age badly. Ten years in, they start asking for more of you than you agreed to give. They want your mornings. Then your voice. Then the part of you that used to interrupt yourself mid-thought because something felt funny or off or promising. Then your life itself. You spend your whole life building a monument to a self you haven’t met in years.

What you want often feels embarrassing because it is not optimized. It doesn’t come with spreadsheets or solutions. It doesn’t scale nor doesn’t explain itself well. You hesitate to say it out loud because it sounds like something a younger version of you would have wanted: and you have been trying very hard to bury that person politely.

Go to where the daffodils glow-

And find the bones that would not grow-

Your heart’s desire often speaks in a whisper, while your fear broadcasts in headlines.

The universe is not a wishing well. It doesn’t respond to sincerity points. But there is something quietly mechanical about it: when you stop lying to yourself, the geometry changes. Not dramatically. But just enough that you notice exits where before there were only walls. Stop asking if your desire is realistic. Ask if it’s alive.

People talk about taking risks as if it’s a single, cinematic act. In reality it’s tiny and granular. It’s the risk of answering honestly. The risk of disappointing the version of yourself that just learned how to survive. The risk of being briefly ridiculous. The safe choice is often a slow leak of the soul.

But failure is not symmetrical. Some failres dissolve you. Others fossilize you. Failing at something you didn’t want doesn’t hurt cleanly: it dulls. It teaches you to distrust your own appetite. It replaces longing with management. Most people don’t fear failure; they fear the aliveness that risk requires.

There are forms of attention that alter rooms. Some people enter and everything tightens. Others enter and something loosens: not because they fix anything, but because they’re not trying to control the atmosphere. They are present without agenda. This is rarer than talent. The present isn’t a stepping stone; it’s the only ground that’s ever held your weight.

As children, we test reality constantly. We fall down on purpose. We jump from great heights. We count the petals of a flower over and over. We repeat moments. We invent rituals not because we believe in them, but because we want to see what happens if we do. Somewhere along the way, experimentation becomes inefficiency, and inefficiency becomes shame. Yet wonder is the antidote to waiting.

Eventually, if you’re paying attention, you realize that whatever you keep returning to is not accidental. Not a quirk. Not a phase. It is the thing that keeps tapping on the glass, long after you’ve explained why now isn’t the right time. Now is not a waiting room. It’s the only room where the door is real. This is where advice usually becomes useless. The question isn’t what should I do. That question assumes some sort of map. A ranking or correct answer. The more interesting question is: where does the world feel less sealed when you’re involved? Where does pressure escape?

Nothing you collect will stay collected. Names slip. Bodies malfunction. Objects quietly rejoin the dirt. What remains are impressions, disturbances in other people, small reroutings. A sentence that landed or a silence that felt safe. A moment where someone forgot to brace. Your legacy isn’t what you leave behind. It’s the echo of how you moved through rooms. Of your dream self that arrives right at the nightmare moment to save the those we now dream of in eternity.

Some people spend their lives building shelters for others and never enter one themselves. They mistake usefulness for freedom, and climb carefully, helping everyone else up, until one day they realize the height has cost them something unnamed. You are not a resumé waiting to be approved. You are a phenomenon happening without permission. You are an event, the event: there are none others to have.

But tthen the inquiry turns inward and becomes dangerous. Who are you without the function? Without the role that gets nods? Without the version of yourself that knows how to be acceptable? This is the persona you built for safety but has become the cage you polish every day.

Peace is not an achievement. It does not arrive as a reward. It sits underneath effort, waiting for you to stop mistaking armor for skin. The only approval you ever needed was your own… and you forged the rejection yourself.

How oddly quiet the present is when you stop interrogating it. Not peaceful: quiet. Like a room after machinery has been switched off but before your ears adjust. In that quiet, that dreadful quiet room, things don’t rush you. Desires surface without demanding justification and fatigue speaks honestly instead of disguising itself as laziness.

I have wrote a lot this year, but of all things I wish is for you to rest….

Meaning is and will never be hidden in grand destinations. It’s forged in friction. In what costs you energy versus what metabolizes it. In what makes time thicken versus what makes it evaporate. You are not late for your life. You never were…. But at some point you will realize you are not steering life so much as consenting to it. Doors will appear, not because you summoned them, but because you stopped barricading yourself inside familiar rooms. When they open, the task will be simple and difficult: walk through without rewriting the story to make yourself safe.

This is not enlightenment. This is not my truth. There is no final state. There is only repeated arrival. Again and again. You will forget this. You will armor up. You will drift. And then - sometimes - you will notice.

And noticing will be enough.

Not forever. Just now.

And now is the only place where anything has ever been.

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