24 things I believe

I know some things

I’m 24 today! This past year my general disposition towards life has been that of bewildered bemusement; a complete genial willingness to let the world teach me what it wants to teach me. Having spent a lot of 22 and 23 as the youngest in every room, I’ve often been overwhelmed with the hunger and gratitude I feel when folks share wisdoms that are just beyond me, like planets whose exact contours I am unfamiliar with but whose gravitational fields impel me inexplicably forward. And the thrill of that is delightful, and I have been delighting in it for some time now. But recently I came into an awareness of how heavily I’ve been leaning on my passive energy at the cost of my active energy, so that when the active energy comes out, it comes out in resentful fits and spurts. I was telling some friends about how I’m constantly pretending that I don’t know something, or that I’m less skilled or powerful than I really am—in order to feel the subtleties of others’ gravities with greater clarity.

So I’m kicking myself out of orbit a bit. I felt like it was the season¹ to nurture my active energy a little more, to find some kind of harmony between the active and the passive, the giver and the recipient. I’ve always been one to ritualize anniversaries, and 24 feels like kind of the right age to be like: I’m indisputably an adult now, so maybe it’s time to rise to the challenge of owning my power? To take responsibility for standing in what I’ve l/earned and use it to steward the world the best I can.

The result is this list of 24 things I believe, written with the audience of my past self in mind. I am excited for the list to change and evolve as I change and evolve, and I’m already curious to know what my 25-year-old self will think of these guideposts a year from now. But for the beautiful time being, here are 24 truths I hold close to my heart:

1. Always reading at least one book you are excited about and having at least one book you are excited to start next will enrich your days. This makes it so that you baseline always have two things in life you are stoked about, which is a pretty great way to be.

2. Connections where you can volley the conversation back and forth like a tennis match moving faster than the eye can see are one of the most delicious experiences in life. If you can even just have a two to four part exchange where you can feel your intellects flashing in sync and it takes a moment for the full force of your mutual generativity to descend upon the two of you, you should feel very, very lucky. (Also you are very smart and you should stop letting people convince you otherwise.)

3. Being patient, waiting for the right time to arise, subtly keeping tabs: all incredibly fruitful endeavors that mostly feel like a whole lot of nothing. Don’t be deceived. Life is long and filled with a ton of keeping the right things top of mind so you can act on them when their time comes. Try not to brute-force; what’s yours is coming.

4. Daily recurrence, revisitation, commitment: also all incredibly fruitful endeavors that conversely feel like a lot of effort leading to nothing, in any given moment. That’s expected. Stay curious about what’s easy to return to over and over again; you’ll become excellent at it without even trying, and there is joy in that excellence.

5. Intergenerational friendships built on the premise that everyone has something to teach, and everyone has something to learn, will crack the world open to you.

6. Realizing that whatever you have is enough is the secret you will keep forgetting.

7. Being in your body will make life richer in ways you cannot yet comprehend. You will encounter sensations that overwhelm and confuse you, and even though there is terror in that, there is also a great power to be gained from accepting them and letting them teach you before you can put words around them. Yoga changed my life, also therapy inflected by Buddhist mindfulness practices. Also somatic IFS. Practice replacing thoughts-about-feelings with inquiries into where the feeling is sitting in your body, what the quality of the physical sensation is. It is so hard and you will struggle with it, but that’s OK—it’s good work, and you will get better. Try blending your in-breath into your out-breath, slowing at the transition points, like a sinusoidal wave.

8. They fucked you up as a kid and it’s not fair. It’s just not. I’m really sorry. You didn’t get what you deserved and you are going to be learning how to carry that hole for a very long time. It may take a while, but luckily, there is a lot of life.

9. I have never regretted accepting a sincere apology.

10. Making music is as necessary as breathing and moving. Pay attention to the quality of the residue left by channeling music through your body: it leaves a sort of fine sun-glimmery sheen over everything in your being. Pay attention also to how people almost comically cannot stop paying attention to you when you are making music.

11. As much as you can, show people how to meet you. I’m in a season of life where I’m comparatively bad at this, but you have to please stop gritting your teeth and pretending you can go ten thousand extra miles for others. Try to get real with yourself, however you can, about what kinds of—sometimes accommodating!—behavior you need from other people, and practice making requests of them. You need to be handled with care at times, that’s allowed, and also people truly love showing up for you in those ways.

12. Love is about being selflessly invested in the other becoming their most wholehearted² self. Love is also about letting the other be selflessly invested in you becoming your most wholehearted self. It’s a reciprocal relation.

13. Enthusiastic mutual respect is its own class of high.

14. You have a place in this world; so does everyone else. Learn to see the ways in which this is already true. Also learn how to make it more true, for both yourself and others.

15. Almost everything good in my life has come from growing the capacity of my attention—being able to hold more and more simultaneously. If you’re overwhelmed, you can try a visualization exercise where you situate the object of your overwhelming fixation in some sort of field, like a 3D rendering canvas, and then slowly zoom the camera out, and breathe, letting whatever thoughts arise also populate the canvas in spatial relation to the fixation, feeling the endless slow zoom out allow you to hold more and more, until everything feels relatively small, and your attentional field is the size of a galaxy.

16. Loving God—if you can figure out what that means to you—will make you very, very joyful. That peace really do be passing understanding, to be honest.

17. If you sense a sort of forceful, incessant, record-skipping thought texture, you are probably expending a lot of energy running away from something very obvious but challenging to face, like believing you are worthy of love as you are now.

18. Whatever it is, you don’t need to do it right this instant.

19. If you feel like shit, it’s OK to rest, but you will probably also feel better after doing something responsible for yourself or for others. Do your roommates’ dishes if they’ve had a long day, or run your sheets through the wash. Or volunteer, or get food for someone. Or wash your hair. In the process you’re telling the small scared part of yourself that you’re still powerful enough to protect it, and that the world is filled with people who will protect other people for no reason other than an internal sense of responsibility towards the world generally.

20. You get weird when you don’t write. Learning how to wield language skillfully is a deep pleasure that yields blessings past any sensible expectation.

21. Give without expectation of return, as long as you aren’t paying in joy, or treating people as projects.

22. An addendum to #12: Love is not something that merely exists between two people, it is a layer of reality that is easier to see in some contexts than others. Believing that love is only present in an instance of a romantic relationship is like seeing a puddle and believing that to be the concept of water itself. The more skilled you become at thinning the veil between existence and the love reality that underlies all of it, the more detailed, inhabitable, and moving even the darkest parts of life become.

23. Moving to the right city, surrounding yourself with the right people, putting yourself in the right environment: I cannot stress enough the importance of context. If you align yourself with your surroundings, everything you want will fall into place seemingly without any effort.

24. Try to live in such a way that would make Miss Sammy Rae proud: If it all goes south, at least we had a lot of fun!

With great joy and love,

Shenai (age 24)

1. New moon in Leo! Solar eclipse! Year of the fire horse! Perseid meteor shower! The stars are singing

2. In the Brené Brown The Gifts of Imperfection sense