There Is No Enlightened, Endlessly Capable Future-Self Waiting at the Finish Line

The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are. A journey of surrender, identity, and the quiet power of letting the self unweave.

Hello dear reader,

How are you this week? What flows in you?

Drei Kühe am Bach (Three cows by a river) (1914) by Heinrich Von Zügel (German, 1850 - 1941)

This week, I find myself in the midst of an inner unraveling, where the usual self dissolved and the usual words did not come. And so I mostly sit in the silence instead of forcing the right vocabulary in which to wrap my experience.

Holding gently still, I offer you the shape of that silence, from my journal pages.

Having waded through a couple of quite tumultuous weeks, rippling outwardly from the inner current's shifts, I went to sit by the river, to be reminded how to flow. I placed one hand on the rocks and another in the water, letting myself calibrate back into life.

“Water is present to its circumstances and surroundings and therefore ready to move in any direction that allows it passage,” wrote Shannon Lee in Be Water My Friend. That openness and pliability means it is in a constant state of natural readiness, “because it is simply being wholly itself.”

“To be like water, then, is to realise your most whole, natural, and actualised self where you are living as much as possible in the slipstream of life as you forge your own path forward.”

The surface ripples

I come to realise all I have tried to do my entire life was to hold it all together. I thought it meant growth. Evaluating oneself and one’s life, improving, gaining skill, becoming a better person—kinder to oneself, to others, to the planet, more resourceful, more resilient, more travelled, more accomplished, more accurate.

Eventually, as life has it, everything I tried so much to hold together would fall apart again, and I would run the same plan of coping which I learned over the years: meticulously pick up the pieces, then sit with them, evaluating which ones I wanted to keep and which to let go of, then attempt to build something new with a few touches of the old. The relationships, the mindsets, the beliefs, ways of making money, places to be in, goals—fine architecture.

I thought I was being smart. After all, I was not trying to blindly return to what was. I knew it was no good to wish for the past to keep stretching itself into the future, unchanged. I learned that after high school. When a man I loved passed away, I stopped reading romantic novels. I was being smarter this time—each time refining the method.

Even when I thought I had already left these concepts behind, outgrown them, I would still continue finding myself in these very same tendencies and patterns, only perhaps made to appear more “mine”—and therefore, I believed, truer. And in some ways, I think they did bring me closer to the truth. They were part of practice, after all—inner archaeology. But they were never the truth. They were simply alternative versions of the same narrative, the same illusion.

I still hoped that if only this time I would be a better builder—if I give it my all, try my bestest-best, heal through the process well enough, stay positive and do not let the obstacles defy me—then finally, thanks to my noble efforts, it will all stay put. Life will reward me for being a good girl, for earning its blessings.

It never stayed put, of course.

Sitting on my bed this week, in the midst of this same attempt once more: more optimism, more effort, more letting go (just in case), more trust—I gave up the fight. Even before I attempted to construct my future life from pre-selected pieces of the old one, I already watched them all slipping through my fingers as if they meant nothing, as if my attempts at grasping were just child’s play and not a desperate Don Quixote’s fight.

I could not do this anymore. I had lost hope it would stick together this time. So, without being sure at all if I was going to lose my mind or cease to exist, I let it all fall out of my hands. No more attempts at fixing, I decided. I am done with it. After all, it is only to the extent that we “expose ourselves over and over to annihilation,” as Pema Chödrön said, “can that which is indestructible in us be found.” And that was what I finally allowed myself to rest in.

In that moment I understood, as if it were the most obvious of obvious truths: in my constant attempts at “fixing” something about my life or myself, I kept assuming there was a constant, prevalent self that needed to be worked on—and another self, somehow, which was wiser and tasked with doing the working.

Up until this point, I tried to see meaning in that. To give purpose to my suffering. But I have realised that while I have made my suffering sacred, healing is not about beautifying my pain—it is about changing the pattern that keeps recreating it. I do not see that meaning anymore. I realised it is not even unfair that despite my best efforts, it is all falling apart. It is just the way it is. Nothing personal there—just like there is nothing personal in the “self”.

The words of the Portuguese Thai Forest monastery’s abbot from my stay there last summer brushed through my mind: nowhere to go, nobody to become, nothing to accomplish. Maybe there really is nothing to fix. Maybe all there is, is what I experience here and now—whether I like it or not.

Maybe that “me” I was trying so hard to become was never missing. Maybe there is no enlightened, calm, endlessly capable future-self waiting at the finish line. Maybe it is just me. Now. As I messy-am. As Jung once said, "The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are."

In that surrender, a kind of peace enfolded me. A strange, fierce softness. Not the peace that comes from everything being okay—finally perfectly holding up together. But it comes from no longer needing to make it “okay” to be worthy of a full life.

What if I can just rest in this spaciousness of enoughness and let life come to me for once? Just letting myself be guided by truth, instead of always carrying the weight of transformation?

The deep current

“...the water was not to be deterred. It was going to find a path, or even multiple paths. It would move along until it met with an obstacle, and then, if it needed to, it would change course and keep on flowing. It used “no way” as its way. In other words, it used every possible way. And it ran along without limitation.”

— Shannon Lee, Be Water My Friend

Even if before I had a glimpse into the nature of self, seeing clearly the non-continuity of it, I could not understand why, if the self arises from moment to moment, my character does not change every second. Why do I still have the same traits, tendencies, fears, preferences, and beliefs (some incredibly limiting and therefore annoying) that I seem to be entrenched in across the years? Where does the sense of self come from?

Here, too, I seem to have come closer to clarity as the tears of the painful unraveling washed away another layer of the illusion:

The cohesive “I” I have long experienced is really just what appears to me now as a web of conditions: bodily sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, beliefs, memories, relational dynamics, environment, traumas not yet metabolised… all constantly shifting. These patterns keep echoing because the web that holds them together has not been fully re-patterned.

There is no fixed self behind these patterns—just interdependent threads. The self is not an essence but a process. A habitual construction.

That entire structure: the self who must heal, the self who is broken, the self who must become whole—is a construct. A story. A survival scaffolding. Useful at times but not true in any ultimate sense.

This understanding has shifted how I relate to effort and identity. I realised that so much of my striving—even toward becoming “a better person”—has been an attempt to fix or polish something that is not inherently solid to begin with. How can one polish a water stream?

I still enact and observe certain patterns in my behaviour or thoughts. My character does not shift every second because the conditions it is based on simply have not shifted altogether. And because they are conditioned upon one another, they remain tangled in this web, arising and passing in a dance. The more tightly those threads are held, the more real the self seems. But when even one is softened or seen clearly, the whole structure begins to loosen.

That means I do not have to fight the patterns I observe in myself—I can unweave them, seeing them simply as threads of conditions, not my-self. I do not have to be afraid that I will “always be this way”, as we tend to think when we have tried to keep up with life for too long without break, because there is no “way”. There is only momentum, and that can be redirected.

Just like a river tends to carve familiar paths through the landscape it is shaped by, which are the result of accumulated momentum—so, too, the sense of self is simply following the old momentum. And that is how suffering loosens, too—not through force, but through disentangling.

Now I can see it: None of the states of self I struggled with are “me"—the striving one, the exhausted one, the not-good-enough one, the hopeful one, the one that holds it all together. None of them need to be maintained when the fuel runs out. I do not need to continue identifying with these conditions.

That recognition felt liberating, but also deeply disorienting. My mind seems to be reasserting itself with even more urgency—striving, planning, fixing—as though it senses the illusion being named.

I thought such insight would result in a sudden rupture in the mind’s momentum, but the mind does not suddenly stop spinning because the insight arises. It slows, weakens, loses authority, but it still runs for a while, like a wheel that keeps turning even after one stops pedalling.

I suppose I am still integrating it, slowly learning how to live from this new understanding. After all, I still need to show up—to support myself, to write, to build.

Today I was sitting with the question of how to honour this insight without turning it into another form of self-improvement. (If I am not careful, it feels as though the mind’s old ways will steer it in that direction.) How to keep softening into it, even when the clarity fades and the mind grows restless again.

It is all very alive—at times painful, at times quiet and luminous. I am still learning how to hold it.

If I can see one thing now, it is that I seem slowly to shift the gravity of my being in the world. It is less and less about accomplishing, and increasingly about participating in the simple and humble unfolding of this moment.

I let the mind keep asking,

“What is next?”
“What am I supposed to be doing?”

And I say:

“This. Just this.”

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I had the honour of being invited by

Elena Brower

to contribute to her Holding Nothing offerings for poetry month.

This week, she featured one of my poems—woven gently into her spacious, soulful world. She held it with such presence, care, and quiet resonance… I’m still moved.

May it offer those who listen or read a soft invitation to return to stillness—a moment of just being—amidst the ever-unfolding unraveling 🤍

You can find it here: just being.

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Next week, we will continue this thread—stepping deeper into the invitation to gently welcome back the whole of us.

The raw emotionality.

The pure essence that reveals itself in peculiar, honest ways—being messy, not having it all figured out, laughing at things nobody else finds funny, loving books that feel like quiet soulmates, cherishing secret habits we never speak of.

We will explore how, in stripping away the illusions—in returning to the immaculate core of who we are—we shed the masks we were taught to wear in order to belong.

And in that shedding, we might discover that we are, in fact, a little strange. Not as we were moulded to be so we might fit in—but truer. Freer. Happier.

Recalibrating.

Flowers collected from the forest’s edge. They smelled so sweet and beautiful!

A question to you, dear reader:

What might begin to shift if you gave yourself permission to stop trying to hold it all together?