My Three Friends, or How I Think About Life Now

Hi! How’s everyone? Welcome back old friends, welcome new ones, and here’s a little Snowy hug.

Today we’re going to talk about…a lot of things. It’s been a little while since I’ve written about deeper things. So here’s a mega-essay. It could be a chapter or three of a book I’ll never write. About orienting our lives and those we love in an age of chaos. 

I am going to teach you today in a much deeper way than usual. This is going to be long, so take a break or three, take a nap, it’s going to hurt a little bit, and a lot of you can skip it too, by the way. We’ve been talking a lot abut money lately, and that’s OK, but today we’re going to go much, much further. Now we need to talk about how we exist, and why it’s going so wrong. I want to connect you with existence at a foundational level now. 

Because doesn’t it feel like right now something has gone existentially wrong at the heart of our civilization, age, time, way, maybe even in each other?

Apologies for not writing that much lately. I’ve been doing sessions with many of you, and I tell you often how amazed and humbled I am by all of you. 

But also because I ran into three friends. 

The first was a member of a group that the fascists are teaching society to hate. I remembered being hated a child. Just for existing. I felt this emptiness all over again. We cried together on the street. I held them in my arms. 

The second. Young. Frightened. Bewildered. Threatened, deeply, by the ugliness sweeping our times. I held them close, and told them: you are just a child. And I was a child like you once. You must exist, and to exist means to love and to be loved. I will guide you and protect you.

The third was someone who, I think, has felt unloved for a long time now. I feel this terrible loneliness in them, this confusion, hurt, this pain. I held them close, too. And I said nothing at all. Nothing needed to be spoken, at last. Because no one can bear all that alone, can they? 

Now. You might say to yourself: so what else is new? Someone’s hurting? Big Deal, cry me a river. Ah, you see?

Why do you think everything around us is collapsing?

The answer to that question is the simplest one of all. Now, when I say it out loud, and don’t worry, I’m about to, Old White Guys (sorry, not you guys, but you know, those guys) will do what they’ve been doing my whole life long. They’ll call it a cliche. Shrug. If only it was.

Everything around us is collapsing for a very simple reason. Our ability to love is stuck. It’s going backwards, if anything.

There is no answer clearer or more accurate than that. Do you see how my friend’s experience is mirrored by the state of all of us right now? We are losing the ability to love. It is in everything around us. It’s in the hate, the ugliness, the stupidity and the fear.

The inability to love is all those things. It is hate, ugliness, and fear. It is spite, rage, and contempt. And by the way, it is the lowest form of stupidity there is. Think about it. Snowy loves me with every fiber of his tiny being. He is a tiny thing with a huge soul, and I tell him that often. I chuckle at it. How can such a big soul inhabit such a tiny body, anyways? The answer is: it doesn’t, and I don’t mean that in the way of naive materialism, a soul is an embodied thing, I mean it in the way that…well, let me explain.

Omega Points, Or What Happens When the Human Journey is Stuck

I don’t share much about me. Maybe not enough. So I’m this mysterious, elusive figure. I say to myself, I tell myself: I’m just a normal guy. I like sports and I walk the dog and I pay the bills. But all the cliches—quick, someone ring the Old Conservative White Guy alarm so they can get me—are, and this is the funny part, really true. Like super true. I walk the streets at midnight, a little heartbroken, and that’s where I really write, in my head. This is just the mechanics. You’ll find me at dusty old cafes in London and Paris, watching, observing, the rhythms of the human experience. I say to my wife: sweetheart, I need thinking time. She rolls her eyes, and, wretch that I am, out I go.

All the cliches are true. I’m every bit the figure that you’d imagine me to be. I’m not a normal guy, in that sense. And that’s not me owning up or confessing, though you can have that if you want it. It’s me telling you about my friends, in fact. 

My friends all feel unloved. One existentially, two socially, three, individually. But the question is: why?

When I walk the streets at midnight, what’s there, and what’s not there? After the day is done, and all the lies are told, capitalism, fascism, money, power, the truth is just this: we are all exactly the same existentially. We lie in our beds, little things, clinging desperately to each other at night. And the universe spins around us.

I am just teaching you to love. That is all I have ever been doing. But first we have to begin with why, don’t we?

Because that’s where we’re stuck. We don’t even remember why to love. So the human journey is stuck here. Democracy in tatters around the globe. Conflict spreading. Hate rising. Every kind of spite returning. Fascism, that most bitter and stupid of evils, rising from the grave.

Our journey is stuck. The human journey. You know and I know that human consciousness must grow now, to a higher level, if we are to “make it.” And that doesn’t mean silly fantasies about conscious AI or sentient humanoid robots. It means something so simple that when I say it, you will immediately see that all of that, along with all the other infantile-narcissistic fantasies of omnipotence and becoming Gods in our own right—they are the truest and only source of evil that humankind ever needed.

And so now, trapped again by these fantasies of being superhuman, which is being Gods, which is what fascism really is, and all the rest of these dystopias before us too, we have forgotten who we really are. That’s the purpose of fantasies. But these have lulled us asleep as a civilization.

We are dust. More mortal than the trees. So fragile that our bones break like twigs. So evanescent, every second, we take a breath just to survive. So small that the stars spin around us. Or are they in us, only we’ve forgotten? I’ll come to that.

The point I want to teach you about today is very simple. We are stuck in the human journey, which is a story of consciousness. And we have returned to what I will call an Omega Point.

An Omega Point just means a Great Turning Point. A breakdown, a collapse. Every now and then, humanity reaches one. And they always go like this. They revolve around fantasies of being other than human. And that is when all hell breaks loose in our world. That is when every form of evil is licensed, encouraged, spreads, kindles, burns through the human soul. Turns it to ashes.

That is how we forget to love.

I cherish my friends, you can tell already. Because I see a kind of authentic pain in them. This bewilderment, this confusion, this terror. This is the terrible, primordial pain of existential loneliness. It’s in all of us. When we recognize deeply it in another, this is the experience of love, and of being loved. This is why, after the day is done, and the fantasies are over, we are left with only this primal experience. We cling to each other at night, desperately. And so the millennia pass.

Don’t you think that’s funny? I don’t even know if this kind of friendship exists much, or enough, these days. I cherish my friends for the hidden truth of their pain. Not because they are inviting me to lavish parties or whatnot to glibly smile and try and pretend none of us are in it. I walk away now from people who are not authentic in existence. So there we sat, me and my friends, just…talking. About what?

About this pain.

From this pain comes the need, the pretense, the child’s play, to be something other than just human. And from that mistake comes all stupidity, all evil. Pain begets pain in this way. And the only solution is there no solution. But there is an answer, and it is in every scripture, in every poem, in every song, in every tree and leaf and breath. That answer is love, of course.

But how do you get there?

I want you to know that your existential loneliness, confusion, bewilderment, especially in a time like this, is the beginning of all wisdom, and wisdom is the first step on the path of love, not the last, just the first. I am about to teach you the rest, don’t worry, and when we’re done, you won’t be the same. You will be connected with your soul, and that will give you the power you need right now to navigate this age of chaos.

But one step at a time. Let us now take our first.

I was thinking about my three friends. What I really wanted to say to them, and to all of you. And so now I am going to tell you the story of my first three friends, and they’re not who you think.

This Weird Kid Called Umair and his First Friend

When I was very, very young, just as I learned to read and write. I’d write stories. And in these stories, there were always these shadowy figures. Death. Time. Fate. They couldn’t speak, but they spoke. They couldn’t see, but they saw. I showed this to my parents one day. My parents showed their friends. Their friends said two things.

One, your kid’s a talented writer. Two, get your kid some help. Go ahead and chuckle, because it’s funny. Like I said, as much as I tell myself I’m just a regular guy, it’s never been true in a regular way. My stories were deeply weird for a kid to be writing.

So my parents asked me. Why are you writing…these…stories? About these…figures? What does it mean? Are you ok? And I said something even more alarming.

“Because they’re my friends.”

Go ahead, spit out your coffee. What a weird kid. LOL, even I chuckle at that.

But you see, to me, I wasn’t “writing stories” at all. I was just sort of a conduit. For these figures. Who I didn’t see with my eyes, obviously, I wasn’t psychotic. But with some deeper part of me that I didn’t know how to name, because no adult gave me a name for it. And so I wasn’t “writing,” it was more that I was sort of transcribing, and the message could only be given in the form of these figures. Death, Time, Fate, Love.

I didn’t know it. I was too little, too small. I was trying to tell the story of existence, of being. Of the human condition, and it’s tragedy. Of existential loneliness. Of our littleness, our finitude, our fragility.

But not to answer it in a childish way, either. By saying: we’re not human, we’re going to become Gods, and that’s the answer to this problem of human existence. Why wasn’t it the answer? Why didn’t this infantile narcissistic fantasy satisfy me even as a child, even though it satisfies everyone from billionaires to fascists to those who follow them, even now, and through the ages, because, don’t kid yourself, all that’s basically about being superhuman…?

Because I understood even then that it would rob us of the power to love. And that was all we ever had, but the price of rejecting it would be more and more catastrophic every time. As in World War, as in the return of fascism, as in “climate change” aka the destruction of the planet, and after that, well, let’s stop there.

And so my first friend was just this, all this. Wisdom, coming to me, in these ways, through these mysterious figures, whose stories were the only I had of expressing what existence was, which seemed to also have the small downside of really freaking people out.

Wisdom has had many teachers, and it comes in many forms. Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, Aristotle, all humanity’s greatest minds, right down to Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, and many more.

I express now what I expressed as a child much more simply. Wisdom is just this: Understanding that the only answer to the problem of human existence is love. Of course, that’s how Fromm and many others put it.

But that, though it sounds like a cliche, isn’t. Because those who say it is have rarely ever practiced it well, if at all. You see, I am here to teach you practices. And in that respect, I don’t call myself a writer really, because that is not the point of what I write at all. They are just words. The practice is the hard part.

Understanding that the only answer to the problem of human existence is love is one thing. Practicing it is the hard part. The very, very hard, confusing, bewildering, and often agonizing part.

Beginning with: rejecting it leads to more and more catastrophic consequences every single time we make that choice. As people. As societies. As civilizations.

So let’s begin here. This answer also means understanding that the answer to any of this isn’t anything that’s not love. Not loving. Not gentle, kind, accepting. That isn’t an embrace of the existential loneliness and confusion, this primal wound, inside each and every one of us. Not any eyes that can’t see how broken every human heart is, and ever was. This is clarity. But how many people are even at this level these days?

Someone in sessions told me: I’ve been with my partner for over fifty years, and here we are, still happy together. I said: you should be teaching the rest of us, and I’m retiring this instant. We laughed, but only because it was true. This is possibly the richest person I know. So in all this, I learn from you, and I’m humbled by you, by your courage and strength and grace. Know how deep this goes for me. So you see what I mean. How rare it is to be loved in this way by even one person.

And maybe that is the limit of the human journey. Maybe that is how much we can love. Finitude doesn’t just mean: we die. It means: we are trying to hold the whole universe in these tiny things called human arms. And if we hold even one other soul, that much is often too great a burden to bear for too long.

Finitude means: the scale of the challenge before us, the challenge of loving, is impossible.

This is the tragedy of the human condition.

And this is depth, the severity, and the power of the lesson of wisdom. It means we must accept a greater pain even than existential loneliness, which is the agony of love itself running out in our very hands. But only this path leads anywhere for us.

The only other way is fantasies, really. shich, in some way, revolve around becoming Gods, whether through money, technology, piety, cruelty, vanity, doesn’t matter, really, and imagining that we don’t need to love at all. But this is the lie of the serpent in the garden, the origin of all deceit. Because in the end, what do we do as wannabe Gods? We just make things that pretend to love us, anyways. AI, money, companies, put our names on plaques, doesn’t matter. And that’s how you waste a life.

By the way, you can’t love things. You can love beings. But not things. How many of us are even at that level, these days?

So you can’t cheat existence. And those who try? You can see where they end up. They poison everything around them. With the lie that love is unnecessary, because for them, the tragedy of the human condition is too much to bear. From this comes all evil, all stupidity, all fear.

And that is how we got here.

Now you are faced with a choice. All of us are faced with a choice. Do we go on believing the foolish lie that hides away the bittersweet pain of being human, or do we grow?

And if we do, or can, what is growth, anyways, really?

This Weird Teenager Called Umair and His Second Friend

Growth, moral growth, spiritual growth, emotional growth, has always meant the same thing. It has never changed its meaning once in the human journey. It just means the ability to love at a higher level.

My second friend wasn’t a person either, like my first one wasn’t. It was an idea. I’ve told you the story of how Canada saved my life before, and of course that means I love and respect and admire Canada. What is social democracy, anyways? In the Anglo way of thinking, it’s politics. Yawn. That isn’t what it is at all, really. It is a form of social organization predicated on a higher level of freedom.

That is a direct reality, not philosophy. The existentialists, in the shadow of the Second World War, wrestled with the question of human evil, stupidity, horror. And they disowned God, famously. But their answer was the same as all the primitives and ancients. Love. And they dreamed up a new form of social organization predicated on it.

That is how European social democracy came to be. And it saved my life, because of course Canada chose that path over America’s hyper capitalism, which is now melting down into fascism. The idea, though, is what I want you to understand. Nobody was to feel desperate, bitter, broken, and in that way, to be seduced by the Oldest Lie, that We Are Beyond Human, which is of course the ur-story of the fascists, as Umberto Eco puts it, aka, fascists seduce people with stories of becoming superhuman.

And you only need this sort of lie if you cannot accept being human.

So the existentialists paved the way for this ultra modern form of social organization, in which advanced ideals like dignity were guaranteed as constitutional rights, etcetera.

My first friend was wisdom, and my second friend was liberation. In Canada, I sometimes tell you, I was free for the first time. Of all the old hatreds and prejudices that had come to make me falter, as a teenager in America. Who hurts a kid? America does, if you’re not careful, and it goes on to this day, in even more brutal form, like school shootings and whatnot. It was a miracle to me. I could breathe for the first time.

What is it today that I do in this cliche of watching the world go by in old cafes in London and Paris? I am watching liberation happen. I am watching lovers, couples, young, old, people, all just exist as themselves. There is no need to lie in that milieu. And that is a profoundly beautiful experience. It gives me a kind of existential happiness that isn’t free of pain, but laced with it, which is the authentic form.

Because love and freedom go hand in hand, don’t they? To love someone is to free them. From all the prisons of the mind and the soul. No, my friend. You are not ugly, stupid, or foolish. You are not alone in this fear and confusion and bewilderment. I hold you in my arms. You are a child of the stars and midnight. All of existence flows through you. You will never be alone. Only nobody has told you this enough. Taught you to know it and feel it.

When I hold my friends, how does all that feel? All that hurts. Why?

Because this is how, we fumble at, through, towards love. Because none of us can express this well all the time, or even a few times, and maybe not at the times we need to most. We will always fail at this challenge. Only once you have learned that can you really fully love someone back right here and right now, and then get to work expanding on that. That’s it, this is all there is, and if you blow it, you blew it. This is liberation. This is all liberation is. This is the only point of the mundane topics of politics, economics, and so forth. Just liberation, in this truest sense, the existential one.

To love someone is to free them to “be themselves,” which is giving them the ability to love, in turn, by the way. There are many names of love, aren’t there? And many ways to express them, too. So love is hyper-mutual and ultra-reciprocal, not “me for you” or “you to me,” an unfolding in widening circles, an ocean, starlight, winter becoming spring, a way for which we Anglos, at least, still don’t even have a half-decent vocabulary. Isn’t that funny? Strange? Or is it telling?

Remember when I said the question is why to love? How that is the reason we’re stuck, because we’ve forgotten it? Because it’s the point of your soul. And hey, if you don’t think you have one, good luck, not in the hereafter, but wasting your life.

So this pain we are enmeshed in, all of us, can take us in two directions. Towards love, or away from it, and into the emptiness, the artifice, of the little self, ego, “I”. Alpha or Omega. Lies or truth, things or beings, power or equality, wisdom or folly, love or hate, existence or deadness, now or never. This is the choice. As Camus said, we make it every day. You can see how our world, and people, are already diverging in this way.

It hurts, just to exist. So what’s our job? To hurt each other more? Isn’t it pretty obvious when I put it that way, what our primary task in existence is? Second, we just see each other for who we truly are. But first? First, we show our true selves to each other. And these are the hidden moments I catch glimpses of from the cafe, between lovers, friends, families, acquaintances, just brief instants. Witnessing this transformation of the soul as it’s liberated? Those moments are profoundly beautiful to me in ways that words can barely contain. And this is our duty to one another.

When I hold my friends, this is what hurts. I wish for them to be liberated. To be free. Not of pain, which is impossible, but existentially. But I cannot enact that liberation alone. I am powerless. None of us are superhuman. All I can do is teach them that in my arms they are loved.

And perhaps that is a beginning. Perhaps that beginning is where we must start again. Just there.

So now you are beginning to know the answers. And I’m not teaching you anything you don’t already know. I am just clarifying for you. I’m just reconnecting you with your soul, because…let me come to my third friend.

My Third Friend, or Death and his Scythe

What does being unloved do?

Being unloved deadens us. Nobody sees us. We turn to glass. Nobody holds us. We turn to stone, heavy, immovable.

Many of you have told me stories of how people around you have gone dead in the eyes recently. How it frightens you. It is frightening. Ancient myths about men of clay or people made of glass. These were warnings, about how being unloved deadens. And here of course by now you should understand that we are speaking in an expansive way.

That is how being unloved deadens us. But let me explain it a little bit more. You can die a million days before your life is gone. That is being deadened. Failed relationships, careers gone awry, marriages gone bad, the feeling of being trapped in a life you don’t want. This deadens us. We go numb. We merely inhabit ourselves, versus existing as ourselves. What reduces us to this?

Being loved is the soul being seen, held, even touched by another, but at the very least, finding its reflection in the still waters of another. In this deepest of ways. My bewilderment and confusion and loneliness in existence is yours. This is who I really am. This is a gift, not a curse. It all we have to give. If I do not give this to you, what have I honored? Who am I but a lie?

But t now I am getting too abstract, so let me tell you about my third friend.

My third friend was Death. The very first figure I wrote about, when I was a child. And in those stories which weren’t stories at all, Death wasn’t an enemy, a nemesis, or a vengeance. He was a friend. He was a brother. He would look at me with great sorrow in his eyes. His tears reflected the endless starlight. But it wasn’t me he wept for.

Later, I got sick. The doctors told me I’d die. I spent years like that, and you know this story too. My lovely wife saved me, on our very first date, and told me: you have a rare condition where the light can kill you. I scoffed, like men do. As always, go ahead and chuckle, she was right.

In those days, my childhood stories were just a foreshadowing, I came to understand. When you spend years at death’s edge, like I did, you see things, hear things, understand things. Not in words. Not in images. In exactly the way I wrote those stories about when I was barely old enough to walk and run.

Death came to me in those days. Just as I had written so long ago. Like a brother. Like a friend. He told me that there was nothing to be afraid of, nothing to fear, and that there was nothing, even to regret. He held me gently, and whispered me to sleep, night after night. Am I speaking to you in metaphors? Is this some kind of allegory? Only to those who have never been in the hands of death.

And he taught me what he was weeping for, too. Not me. Not himself. Us. But not in the way we think. Because our understanding of death is that he takes life. But that is wrong. Life is not taken and it is not given. We aren’t Gods. Life is neither had, nor not had. Life is nothing we can express in binary, dialectical, oppositional terms like this, which is what Buddha and Socrates and Aristotle all taught us.

Death was weeping because he just watches us. He doesn’t use his scythe. It is only there to remind us of who we are. We use it on each other. Don’t we? We hate, we rage, we pillage, we kill. We use it on ourselves, too, all the time, shouldering the blame or guilt for mistakes, erupting in self-destructive vengeance.

And this is how we grow deadened. Life ebbs. The scythe is different. It deadens. These are not the same. And so this rather obvious shortage of love flowing through our world—it is just in ourselves. From each, to the next. And so our whole civilization’s growing deadened in this way. Death was weeping for this, which is the most human action of all. We kill ourselves a little bit every moment we don’t love.

Death holds the scythe. We use it.

Life is the flowing of love through consciousness in space and time.

We can liberate it. Or we can cut it down, with the scythe.

Knowing the truth of this, and the correct choice, is wisdom. 

And every step we take in that direction, the more alive that we are, become, feel.

Doesn’t our age feel dead? Doesn’t it feel like things are dying? Can’t you see it in people’s faces? We are on the wrong path. Every moment we spend choosing the scythe over the embrace deadens us.

To create lives resounding with truth, dignity, meaning, grace. Only this path, this sequence, this most ancient of ways reveals them. Primordial humankind knew it, because in that state of being, of course, everything was nameless, and everything was alive, and there was no reason to need to be a God. God was everywhere, and in everything, including the self. There was no not-God or God. There was just consciousness and eternity, against finitude and mortality, as pure as midnight.

That is why when Death knelt before me and wept, when I was a small child, and again, when I was becoming a man, that he held me in his arms and whispered to me why. Because he is the keeper of this great truth, which is retold in everything around us, over and over again. In every breath we take. Stardust. Sunlight and moonlight. Water flowing. Seasons changing. The way of all that, which is the embrace, or the way of the scythe. We choose, in every action, in every moment, with every heartbeat.

So My third friend was Death, who taught me that wisdom is the freedom to love in purer and higher and deeper and greater ways. That that is the only secret there ever was, which was never a secret at all, because it is in everything around us, from the stars to the dust.

But our forgetting that is the human condition, too. We’re trapped. Enmeshed in it, for millennia. This condition, which is pain so unbearable that it blinds us. We go blind. To the simplicity and essence of existence itself. And so we forget how to love, struck to our knees by this pain, lashing out, screaming in rage. Who am I? Who made me? Where will I go? Who will see me then? If nobody can save me from dying, doesn’t that mean love is nothing at all? 

This is what we do Instead of just looking around. If we did, we’d see an endless sea of beings, kneeling, just like us, in just this pain, as wide as the universe, stretching to the very stars. What do you think would happen if we saw that? We could begin revealing it, even to ourselves. Being it. The thing that we truly are. Beings so afraid, so hurt, so wounded, that after all the lies are done, the truth, like I said, is just this: they need to desperately cling to each other at night.

This is the challenge of true maturity, for a person, for a civilization, for humanity’s journey, for all are the same.

Putting down the scythe, and just offering each other our broken hearts.

Everything else, we learn, in the end, is a lie.

Don’t you think that’s true in America, especially? I do. We laugh clumsily when we’re in the most pain. We pretend Everything’s Just Fine. Who can see us and hold us that way? We hide ourselves existentially and we wonder how we ended up here. Stop wondering.

When we hold our true selves, which are so full of all this pain, in our hands, and say, this is what I am, that is a beginning, from which all things are possible, but it takes courage, strength, and grace, of the deepest kind of all, to begin there. That is the beginning of freedom. From that act comes love, which isn’t at all “I love” or “you love,” but just a kind of flowing, because of course, it isn’t something we can ever do alone.

Living with the terrible, primordial, eternal pain of being fatally human, so powerless, so alone. Either we surrender to it, which creates the act of love, or we live a lie. But surrendering to the truth of us is much, much harder than the pretense. That we are anything else, or that we need something else, or that we deserve anything less. Not just “to be loved” or “to love,” in the clumsy, individualistic, Anglo ways of putting it, but to move and breathe and exist together in all the names of love.

So all that is the hardest thing of all. So hard that many of us cannot do it, no matter how much religion, spirituality, morality, history, education, all the systems we have ever built, try, again and again, to drum all this into us. So hard that even expressing this well is still very, very difficult, so much so, that here we are, all tied into knots again.

So hard is this that we collectively get stuck at Omega Points, and everything falls apart, as turn to hate, spite, and ugliness, all over again, instead, and that is why history moves in a cycle, a wheel, a spiral, not a line, not ever. That is how deep it goes, this problem of love and being unloved.

Life is so short that is barely one breath. Tiny human arms can barely hold one other, in one expression of love, for even one lifetime, let alone a whole world, or a universe. This is how alone and fragile and powerless we are. That is the reason that we love. Is it not the reason we give up on love.

And so we choose. The scythe. Or what? What’s the other choice? When we are wise, we are free enough to surrender to love. And children are this wise. Little things are this free. We are the ones who complicate things, because we are seduced by the lie that there is Some Other Answer. You see, surrendering involves humility, this time at an existential level. Human beings aren’t known for that particular quality. Us? We make wars over little colored flags. And yet without this deep, existential humility, we end up right back in the oldest lie, We’re Gods, on which is etched every wretched form of conflict in human history. All conflict is self-conflict, and self-conflict is always: I am not who I really am. But who can see you then?

So who are you? The answer for us is too simple to accept. Love flows through me. I am not the source. There is no source. There is only all, becoming all. And so I see glimpses of a thing called love, but I can only barely see through its eyes. Sometimes it hears me, but I can barely speak its words. I want to be everything I am. I want it to be everything I ever was. Why won’t it be? Why am I not loved? And if I’m not, who am I? What am I? Am I just this stupid, empty thing who will die?

You are a child of existence. You are just human, and you would break like a twig shattered by a volcano, in an instant, with just a single pure and true name of love. Even one is too great for a single human life to ever contain, express, hold the totality of. The closest we get are the smallest acts. We love one person in this way. Five in that. Ten in that. A hundred, a thousand in that. And then what? We tend to a community. We plant our gardens. And then what? We write our books, we leave behind what we can. And then what?

You see how limited we are. This is our powerlessness. And then what?

This is when we choose. The embrace or the scythe. 

The Choice and the Moment

This is the point at which we learn to love at a higher level. Or we don’t. But there is no we. There is just you and me. There is us. There are those we do love, those we can love, and those we should love.

And the question now is: are we doing a good enough job? At existing in an authentic way? Are we honoring what it is to exist?

My three friends, in so much pain, reminded me of my three oldest friends.

And this is the point at which you now must learn from my three oldest friends. Wisdom, Liberation and Death. I wrote this essay to tell my friends in so much pain, and you, what my other three friends have been teaching me all my life. 

Because now is the time for such difficult things. 

The truth is that essays like this don’t do a very good job. I disappoint myself with them, always. I fumble through them, grasping for meagre words. 

Yet now is the point at which those who can learn must. Because now those who walk the path of love and those who walk the other one will diverge and separate. The path of love leads through the valley of the shadow of death. But as we walk it, take those first fumbling steps, we discover the secret.

Either we hold the scythe.

Or we hold each other.

Lots of love,

Umair (and Snowy!)

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