how to stay awake to your own life
on remembering what matters
Last month, I went on a flight in a tiny 4-person plane over the Bay Area in California. As expected, this was a rather miraculous experience, peering below at the recognisable rugged and wild Californian coastline. We soared over wide, empty plains of rich greens, dashing blues, mini skyscrapers, Silicon Valley behemoths, Lego cars and homes, evidence of material riches and lack thereof, the machinery of industry, nature and life all at once. This is where Jobs helped popularise the personal computer, where the hippies fought and failed for love, where Howl by Allen Ginsberg was written. I thought about all the impassioned utopias created and collapsed in this particular pocket of the earth we call north California. I thought about its undeniable natural beauty, its creative and productive abilities, its many belief systems, contradictions, contributions and detractions to the project of humanity.
However, amidst the feelings of serenity and amazement, we also encountered many moments of extreme fear-inducing turbulence. Now, I have experienced my fair share of aerial turbulence in my life, but on this day I discovered there is something uniquely terrifying about being in a 4-person plane that makes every shake feel especially disastrous and final. Our small plane jerked impolitely around through the empty cloudless sky, bouncing up, down and to the left without any consideration for our own personal feelings about the matter. I slowly breathed in and out, reckoning with the fact that I had absolutely no control over our life in this moment. In a very real sense, there was nothing I could do.
The only person who had any semblance of control was our trusted friend and pilot Weilon, whose competencies I did have full faith in. My faith had been built when he earlier had recounted how he had spent many hours tirelessly studying how to make flying go as smoothly as possible. He described how only 20% of people who attempt to get their pilot’s license actually complete the full program, because of how much effort it takes. Unlike how alarmingly easy it is to get a drivers license, I was relieved to hear there were many inconvenient hoops one had to jump through to become a certified pilot. Weilon also exuded a responsible, trustworthy, serious presence that experienced software engineers often have. But even then, I was struck that there was still a real risk no amount of planning or skill could eliminate. Our future was ultimately in the hands of indifferent nature, or call it the Gods, or fate.
Weilon informed us after we landed that this level of turbulence was very unusual. Luckily, he had the consideration to only tell us this fact after we were safely on the ground, otherwise I probably would have been a lot more stressed in the air.
As I was acquainting myself with the feeling of walking on solid ground again, I found myself overcome with a somewhat cliché but sincere gratitude for life, a recognition of our finite existence, and a sudden awareness of everything I had been taking for granted. I thought about how I would highly recommend this experience to anyone who has lost touch with the inherent precariousness of being alive and is in need of some kind of existential wake-up call. I thought perhaps we should prescribe turbulent plane rides to people feeling generally numb to their own life.
As I thought about it more, I began to wonder whether there are other ways to access this awakened state. People who have near-death experiences often describe suddenly becoming awake to their own lives, realising they were on an entirely wrong trajectory, or had been taking everything for granted. Many describe either making drastic changes almost immediately, or arriving at a deeper state of gratitude for the life they already have. The same commonly happens after a terminal diagnosis, or the sudden death of a close family member or friend. The thread running through these experiences is that the possible end of everything is rudely and abruptly brought into view. This reminder seems to have a clarifying effect, illuminating what we had been taking for granted and suddenly reordering our priorities. It can make us live with more presence and deliberation, forcing us to reckon with the ways in which we may have sleepwalked into a life we do not want to be living.
Yet, in some sense, we are always deeply fragile, this is just easily obscured to us in the daily undertakings and motions of our life. Sure, we may be especially fragile in a tiny plane due to the increased risk, but there is also very real risk in crossing the street, loving or trusting someone, going outside, doing almost anything at all.
I think often about how easy it is to forget this fragility, and with it, what actually matters. In my experience, this knowledge seems particularly slippery. I think this forgetting is also part of what produces most midlife crises. You can delay enquiry for many decades, it would appear, but it often persists as an underlying nausea, until one day it strikes you with a burning what am I doing that is impossible to ignore, leading to all the chaotic decisions one in a midlife crisis is known to make.
I began to wonder: how might we remain familiarly acquainted with this awareness, without tattooing it on the back of our hands or making it our phone screensaver (though, honestly, maybe not bad ideas). How how might we stay in touch with that acute realisation of life’s fragility and what actually matters to us in other, less frightening or traumatic ways? If we could access this state in every waking moment at will, how differently might our lives look? How might we learn to live in full lucidity, unobstructed by an accumulated blurriness?
One way to describe this state of being is remaining lucid. Lucid is one of my favourite words and a trait I would use to describe all of my favourite people. Lucidity is a way of seeing, an ability to see what lays beneath what may initially appear, glowing and cutting through an earthly fog. I admire lucid thinkers, dreamers, seers. I think to describe someone existing in a lucid way is a strong compliment. The word gives me imagery of cool, clear water - refreshing, clarifying, illuminating. What follows are a few of the reminders that have returned me to this state, including the people, works of art, and practices that have helped me stay awake to my own life.
people as lucid portals
One way that seems to help is meeting people who themselves are particularly lucid and clear-eyed, who have so clearly organised their life around what matters to them. You can see how their life has been animated by a fundamental quality of intent, a deep reconciliation and careful evaluation of what was expected from them, integrated with their own essence. Being in their orbit can feel instantly clarifying, like I become more awake by osmosis, just from witnessing how they exist in the world. These people are self-possessed in such a remarkable and palpable way in which I can’t help but wonder ‘how did you come to be this way?’. They instantly remind me that a fuller life is possible, simply by embodying an energetic, life-loving, fully alive, vivid presence. If I go long enough without encountering someone like this, it can be easy to forget this way of existing is even possible. I wrote about a few specific people in my life who evoke this within me and their traits more in an essay last year misery is contagious, but so is joy).
But just as people can inspire you in their way of being, reminding you of what is possible and raising your ambitions for yourself, I think it is equally useful to meet people helping you understand the life you do not wish for. When I worked at a previous job, I would ask sometimes senior leaders how they arrived at their position, eagerly awaiting impassioned stories. Yet, more times than not, the response was something along the lines of, you know, I guess I don’t really know. I kind of just fell into it. One thing after another happened, and 10 years later, here I am.
Hearing these experiences struck the core of my soul with a deep fear. Often, their life was indeed very satisfying and fulfilling, but I immediately knew that I did not personally want that as my path. I wondered to myself, what is it about this particular life path that scares me? And how might I try my very best to avoid a similar fate for myself? If I don’t actively consider this, it appeared frighteningly easy for life to unfold in such a way.
art as lucid portals
Sometimes works of art can awaken us to this fact too. One time when my friend was in a mediocre relationship, I sent her the poem ‘Do Not Love Half Lovers’ by Khalil Gibran (quoted at the end of this essay) and she decided to break up with him the next day. The poem seemed to reach somewhere all my explanations and advice had not, giving form to a truth she already knew but had not yet been able to admit.
Another classic quote that grounds me is Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. In 1990, as Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system, it turned back to take one final photograph of Earth from around 3.7 billion miles away. In the image, our whole planet is less than a pixel, a small point of light suspended in darkness. Sagan later wrote about the photograph in a way that, to me, captures exactly this feeling of being violently returned to perspective:
writing as lucid portals
Self-reflection and writing can have a similar effect of forcing oneself into lucidity. While you can quite easily lie to yourself while journalling, it is at least a little bit harder than just thinking about it, as you must confront your slippery beliefs in the attempt of pinning a thought’s fickle, slippery fleeting state into unmovable words. A thought kept inside the mind can keep changing shape to protect itself. On the page, it becomes a little less evasive.
Writing exposes my inner contradictions, the places where I am saying one thing and living another, where I am pretending not to want something I clearly want, or pretending to want something I do not actually want at all. In this sense, writing can be a kind of self-interrogation. It asks me to provide evidence for my own life, to notice why an experience moved me, bothered me, or made me feel the need to defend something so strongly. Of course, this is not a foolproof method. I also often write myself into further confusion, mistaking the elegance of an explanation for the truth of it. But even then, writing gives the confusion at least a shape, something to see and press up against.
Writing also creates a record for my future forgetful self. I sometimes write in a rare moment of clarity that I know I will later need to be reminded of. Indeed, this is part of the reason why I started this blog in the first place, and why my bio is writing toward aliveness.
stay lucid
Maybe all I mean by lucidity is anything that briefly interrupts the blur of everyday living. Each interruption has the potential to return me, however temporarily, to the impossible fact of being alive. Eventually, of course, I forget, and the ground becomes ordinary again for the thousandth time. Still, some part of me remembers exactly how thin the membrane is. I wonder if this is the best we can do, not live forever in revelation, but leave ourselves enough reminders that we can keep finding our way back.
A question I’m curious about: how do you stay lucid to your own life? What practices or disciplines help you remember our predicament?
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misery is contagious, but so is joy
“I wanted to eat life by the mouthful, to devour it, to be swallowed up in its dizzying vertigo, to be both actor and spectator, to possess and be possessed, to discover and to create, to make of my life a work of art.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)
clap when the plane lands
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
“Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not live half a life and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasise about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Half a life is a life you didn’t live
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists to live a life not half a life”
- Khalil Gibran
i find nature is the best reminder and teacher when it comes to staying lucid. yesterday the way the sun was shimmering on the sea snapped me out of ordinary consciousness and i smiled
i really loved the way you framed writing and art as portals to lucidity. some understandings arrive and take hold of you before you can fully explain them. we owe it to ourselves to listen when they do.