The Problem

You don’t want to say that you aren’t succeeding in some of the things that are most important to you.

The relationship you really wanted to work ended when they got sick of you, or you wanted to be free from their bullshit.

You long for someone better. You long to be someone better.

You have a career, but somehow it’s not fulfilling. You eat, drink, buy stuff, gossip or stay distracted online to fill that hole in your life.

You want to live somewhere else, somewhere better than where you live now.

Your friendships are great, but they’re also fragile, and you can’t just be yourself, let your hair down and let go, the way you yearn to.

You’re grateful for your body, but you also hate it. You indulge it. You deny it. You stuff it. You worry about it.

You want your world to be a good place, where sanity and kindness prevail, but it keeps on being chaotic and dangerous, painful and threatening, filled with misery.

And you aren’t helping. You ignore, look away, hope it gets better on its own, without your leadership or contribution. You feel trapped. You know something is missing, but what?

Whatever you’re working on, it’s not working, and you’re the problem. Or someone else is the problem, but there’s a problem, and you live with the problem.

You want to be good at something important to you, but you don’t really want to do the work.

Or you’re doing the work to be good at something, but you don’t master it. You hit a wall or a plateau and go no higher.

Or you started something with a bold vision, but now you’re just going through the motions, without fulfilling on the vision in the real world.

You want to find someone to follow, but no one is worth believing in when you get right down to it.

Or you follow others in order to belong, even when it takes you away from yourself, from your peace and center.

Nothing surprises you anymore. You have tamed yourself, and you have tamed your life. People know what to expect of you, and you stay inside the hard, invisible lines of your judgment. Nothing really new ever happens.

You are perfectly predictable and what you most want is perfectly unpredictable. You are stuck like a dinosaur in quicksand, struggling, but not getting free. The weight of your ego, of your self-sense, is too great. You aren’t dancing, you’re writhing.

And your life is a sad adaptation to this fact. You are not living full out. You are a worrying clod of complaints and self recriminations waiting to die. And putting on a brave face.

And rather than open yourself you remain closed. You protect and defend the way you are rather than take the risk to let something unknown enter into your world or allow someone to help, or lead, or give you anything you don’t already know or agree with.

You want to contribute with your life, but what can one person really do?

You are alone in the cosmos and no one is coming to save you, and you know it.

You need a transformation.

And that means risk.