I no longer have any close friends or family that I interact with on a day to day basis. Nor do I have a partner that I can go to for support and self-assurance. Though, everyday I seek people to talk with and be with, most people in my life are caught up with other relationships or endeavors. Like most of us, time is limited.
I have to draw all my motivation, and strength for the day, by myself. I have to constantly talk with myself. Removing ideas that would otherwise spiral me towards a depression and replacing them with the belief that the universe will support my burning desires, in time. Often, these aren’t apparent at all, and just feel like emotions of doubt and fear. In this, I have to use my willpower to guide the energy towards trust and love through non-specific methods.
Recently, I acquired a new job as a janitor. A job that I thought was rather easy, though at the same time, I knew it wasn’t very well respected in terms of how our society usually views individuals with such a job. Nevertheless, I held this job longer than any other job I had. My temperament is like most people these days. I can’t seem to enjoy work! Most jobs pay too little and have us work too much. Which is why it needs to be reiterated, time is always limited.
It is no coincidence, therefore, that the job market is seeing a decline in workers. Perhaps, it is the heightened sensitivity of the younger generation of people. The stress of work is very challenging to work out through mindfulness alone. Everyday, I found that my solar plexus cringed slightly anytime the thought of having to work entered my purview. A kind of stress that makes sickness a more likely possibility and reality seem just a bit more dull.
In any case, I found myself with an extreme pressure on one particular day of work. Though it is unusual to explain, the center of my brain was tickled by a powerful sensation. So much so, it felt like torture. Any kind of interaction with others seemed impossible on this day, because I felt a powerful urge to simply be myself. I remembered how much I felt as though I belonged in a work environment of my own terms. But, I had no way of getting there.
So I left early and called my boss for some unpaid time off, completely unsure of where my rent money would come from. I felt it necessary to simply dive into that unknown and trust that the universe would work things out for me.
Often I found myself at work vacuuming the floor with my headphones on. I would listen to words of various people who motivated me to work on my own independent wealth. I suppose writing this blog is one small action in that direction. But, then there is the other side of course, that motivates me towards more compassion and cooperation with others. I realized that in any endeavor, you will need others to help you. As the psychedelic explorer Timothy Leary once said, “Find the others”.
“The Others” can mean people that understand your expanded nature. But, perhaps on a more grounded level, it is referring to some kind of clan or group you can rely on. Some friends that help you succeed in the material life and the spiritual one. As trivial as it sounds, I first got a taste of this when I played Playstation 2 online for the first time with a game called SOCOM II.
It was one of the first games that had a built-in clan feature (or guilds) that people could join and battle as a continuous team. The friendships that were formed, often transcended the video game world into real world discussions and motivation.
This experience allowed me to feel extremely connected with people. It was many years later where I would find many spiritual circles that gave me a similar feeling. Though, at the end of the day, I was always left to my own devices with very little assistance from anyone else. The feeling of comradery died down when we considered wealth creation, because there is always going to be someone that is granted a bit more than others. As an example, these spiritual groups would often only meet if there was some kind of monetary exchange taking place. This makes sense, since we all desire to follow our passion at the same time we can pay the rent.
These journeys have grooved my life towards a very lonely creative endeavor, that can easily seem hopeless if I do not constantly remind myself that I am capable of real success at any point in time. Daily, I test out what could make me a living through what I enjoy doing (such as writing, podcasting, video games, music and animations). If it weren’t for the various YouTube tutorials and guides online, I don’t see how I could have made any progress at all. And although there is always more information that could help me here and there, it seems that at a certain point, a wall is hit and one simply has to grind or get lucky.
One such example of this is when I released my “Dolphin Musing” animation on TikTok.
On TikTok it received a solid 1500 or so views and hundreds of likes. However, I decided to delete it so I could move it to another channel. When I re-uploaded it, the same video got less than 100 views with about 6 likes.
The attention any piece of my work may receive, seems entirely dependent on happen-chance. Who happens to be flipping through that specific social media at that specific time. The quality (which I always thought was abysmal, until I added hashtags and people started liking my stuff) could easily be very low and still grant more views and likes than stuff that took me far longer and more skill to create.
This way of viewing the world is not at all useful. It can’t be luck, but destiny. As certain spiritual wisdom relays to us,it is more about our trust in the universe than our trust in what external perception others may have of ourselves or of our work.
It seems as though, we can all pick out a piece of creative work and say to ourselves “I could do that!”, and yet that piece of work is very popular and ours remains completely unknown. In arriving at a level wherein we are already at that magnanimous state, then it can’t be luck, but only a matter of synchronous time. Time is the only thing that seemingly makes us doubt we are good enough to obtain all we sought after. So in time, we can resolve all doubt of any failure that we may have believed to be true.
Glimpsing the trough as the crest and the crest as a higher level.
Rokazulu's Mystical Eschaton 