If you are a follower of this website, you may have noticed that it has been inactive for the last two weeks. This is by design. One of the difficulties of posting on a website once a week means that, once a week, I must align myself to do tedious tasks to do with website updates instead of writing, which I do not like. And in addition to that discomfort, I also must have finished mulling over one idea or story and completed that reflection in my head in a relatively short amount of time. But what happens if an idea is more complex?

What happens if your being is percolating, say, hundreds of little connected ideas all together, at the same time?

I was reflecting lately that we take on ideas and learnings not all logically, but sometimes by bypassing our conscious mind. The idea, maybe literally overnight as we sleep, just becomes a part of us. 

None of us have ever sat down and taken each of our beliefs and ideas, one by one, and decided to take them on. Our existence as individual people is the byproduct of probably millions of interactions with wisdom, knowledge, curiosity, questions, answers, all steeped into our particular contexts as people living in certain places, at certain times, and living certain lives. This has all really got me wondering lately how much control we even really have over our being-ness. 

Have you ever come across an idea that was so outside of what you’ve ever thought about, the sheer fact that the idea exists just blows your mind? I’ve been doing that a lot lately too. In short: nothing feels complete enough to write about right now as I am in the thick of my experience as a human. I am questioning everything and this has sometimes led to new levels of joy that I didn’t know existed as well as lows to do with the meaning of my own existence.

In these last few weeks, I have told a few select friends that I feel like an empty cup. I am a vessel and I am empty. I feel devoid of everything. Everything I have tried to use to fill me has not worked at any time in my life. This time, I have done my best to refrain from filling myself with anything—to really sit with the empty, desire-less, nothing that I feel. I have done so with a great deal of impatience and discomfort, and a less than perfect process that I know was the exact process I was meant to have. 

In the meantime, the ideas that I have been considering are starting to actualize. Some have reached the surface of my existence such that I can verbalize them—I am one of those people that has to really understand an idea to take it on. Other ideas are there now, in my body, in process, still difficult to put into words but the connections are being made in the background of my life, even in my sleep—in my dreams.

One such idea that has possibly finished cooking inside me is that sometimes we think we are at the end of something, when we’re really in the middle. I can think I am at the end of a path I didn’t like and am eager to finish it, but I could also be in the middle of a path I do like if I only knew how the path will progress. Since I can’t, all I need to do is exhibit some patience and grace with myself and my story. Patience is a virtue that many of us don’t put much effort into cultivating. In fact, it is a virtue many of us dislike. And yet, it is a virtue, and it is worth practicing willfully so life doesn’t force us to practice it.

“Patience does not mean to passively endure. It means to be farsighted enough to trust the end result of a process. What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be so shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience, for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.”¹

I also like the idea that sometimes a bad thing is a good other thing. For example, chicken is a terrible vegetable, but it is a great meat. Maybe sewing is a great way to make clothes, but a bad sport. Maybe an awkward social situation is a great learning exercise. Maybe a difficult lesson is great knowledge. How many things are we looking at in life and saying it is bad because we are expecting it to serve a purpose other than the one it’s been assigned?

And you know what, I like who I am becoming as I stew on these ideas—these few are more around completion but others that are still percolating in my body. They make me uneasy as there are so, so many damn questions inside me that I still don’t understand the answers to, even though I know the answers. 

Everything on the planet right now feels like a giant, ever-expanding, ever-extending web of occurrences that I can now see as all of God’s will playing out, all at the same time, in perfect unison, at the perfect time. 

Each of us are fundamentally playing our parts, whether we see it or not, and whether we feel good right now or not. Each of us is too preoccupied with our own small roles and our tiny, non-existent problems, to see how we are playing a role in something much grander, that could put our hearts at ease. Each of us is playing our roles, perfectly, even when we feel like we’re not, following roads on God’s larger map that are sure to collide with the right people, places, and energy for us in the future, and that everything we need will appear when we truly need it. In this case, there is no reason to worry about anything. Everything is enough. In short, to you and to myself: there is no reason to worry so much.

All of these ideas and breakthroughs have been through the discomfort of breakdown over the last few weeks, by allowing myself to feel like an empty cup. That empty cup feeling left me feeling like I wanted something to fill me—it made me feel thirsty. Initially I asked God to fill me with water. At some point I realized that maybe I am not the empty cup that wants to be filled with water—I want to be the water itself. Completely fluid. Relentless yet formless.

“Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.

Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”²

I can see that I am trying myself, trying to break away all of my rigidity, to be formless. I am still learning what this means. Maybe I am not quite water yet. But I am practicing.

And this brings us to the point: I will likely be here to a spotty degree until I reach whatever degree of fluidity I am meant to. I would say be back soon, but I am not sure.

1. Elif Shafak. (2009). The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi. Viking.
2. Lee, B. (1975). Bruce Lee: The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art. Black Belt Communications.