I was listening to a podcast about a man who so badly wanted to be great - and he was. Every business he started took off and was a huge success, he revolutionized sports with a book he wrote about efficiency, he had many great loves, people he loved and who loved him, he was a success by every measure. He was also completely unsatisfied.
At every turn he felt like it wasn’t enough, he wasn’t enough, the business or the project wasn’t enough. And so he would begin again. Moving from project to project either to fulfill some great need / lack, or to distract and outrun this ever-present emptiness.
One day after enough projects, piling up projects for projects sake, enough exhaustion, enough success that still didn’t satisfy, he took his own life at sixty years old.
God this scared me. It was a wake up call per-say: The perfectly well to-do and loved person who can’t come to terms with their own inner desires, they can’t every arrive, they keep scanning the horizon, looking out there, missing what’s here, they can’t stop building the resume, and they just never stop running from thing to thing, from project to project.
When the podcast was over I thought of an ex who insisted that I hear her when she grabbed my face, looked me in my eyes, and said, Life is not a self-improvement project.
There is no finish line, she pleaded, No place we cross where we can finally feel like the work is done. If we spend all our time watching the world from the outside-one foot in, one foot out- combing it for lessons, inspiration, words and wisdom, we might actually miss it by never truly being present for any of it.
The Buddha called it samsara - the cycle of becoming. The endless wheel we spin, chasing some version of ourselves that’s shinier, more accomplished, more whole. One project ends, another begins. We get recognition, it’s not enough, one identity dissolves, and we scramble to build a new one. We keep going, not because we’re alive, but because we don’t know how to stop.
The root of said suffering, the Buddha taught, is tanha, thirst and desire. Not thirst for water or food, but for becoming. For recognition. For arrival. Not because desire is bad, but because it binds us to a future that hasn’t arrived and a self that doesn’t quite exist. We hunger for what’s next, what’s better, what’s more. But the hunger never ends.
I know this thirst and hunger.
I know how easily life can become a resume. How the body can keep moving while the soul stays behind. How we convince ourselves that once the next thing is done, then we’ll rest. Then we’ll breathe. Then we’ll be enough.
But rest doesn’t come that way.
The first arrow is life. The second is the story we lay on top of it: that we should be somewhere else, someone else, doing something better. That even our peace should be optimized. I want to stop shooting the second arrow. I want to be present for my life, not an observer to it. I want to be present for others, not an observer to them. I want to show up for others, not just for myself.
“The rush and pressure of modern life are a form of its innate violence... To surrender to too many demands, to commit to too many projects… destroys our own inner capacity for peace.”
We think busyness is purpose. That building is becoming. But sometimes, it's just noise. The Dharma tells us: peace is not the end of a journey, it’s how we walk. These days, I’m trying to step off the wheel, or trying to walk through it, with it – because I can’t run from it – it’s me. We can’t run from ourselves. No matter how hard we try. Because no thing, place, person, hobby, and all the resume building in the world will stop us until we are ready to meet us. Here. Just here.
Here we stop becoming and start being. Here we walk slower. Breathe deeper. Listen more. Nit build more.
Life is not a self-improvement project. Life is life.
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Let's Go Chris!!!
This is something I’ve been sitting with lately. Being fully present to my life.
We are human beings, not human doings, after all.