THE STRUGGLE IS REAL

You’re not the only one who puts on a strong and happy face despite the torment that goes on in your mind.

The trouble with willpower is that we can inch our way forward while freaking out inside. We can look cool, calm, and collected, we can keep it together, and yet, inside, we can be a hot mess of doubt and endless deliberation.

So nobody knows.

And other-bodies knowing is the most frightening thing.

That’s the good thing about credit cards. They keep secrets. As long as the others don’t have to know, you’re safe still, keeping it inside.

You weren’t supposed to be here by now. I mean, inside. For all you know, for all you’ve learned, you were supposed to be calm in there. Not worried about the things that worried you. You saw yourself, eventually, embodying your ideals, not still wishing for them and fretting that they evade you.

Regression brings its own kind of brutal doubt. Would you really slide this far back if where you were going, you were destined to arrive?

In recent years, worse than any sweeping impact of climate, virus, or war, I posit has been the isolation of individuals into their individuality. We are nearing the end of the age of I, not by calling wisdom of transcendence, but by necessity for the cost of its insanity.

The dark side of do-it-yourself is not only the punishing aloneness but the impossibility of ascent towards a goal held up by others. There is nothing we can do alone, and the more we try, the more we isolate ourselves into habits of homebound intellectual inquiry and mental masturbation, zoom meetings, social media-induced passivity, massage guns for touch, powdered greens for vegetables, the more we become shells of ourselves.

It is no wonder that it feels harder to achieve as we hollow out all that we are and are capable of with single-dimensional replacements for the cultivation of creature comforts. It is both the loss of dimensionality and the exalting of comfort that is the quicksand of our struggle.

To dirty your fingernails with soil in the 45-day making of your greens, to have the warm body of a stranger embrace you and hold longer than anyone but your mother has in decades, to feel, when a person speaks, their breath, the vibration of their chest and the breeze of their hand as they gesture is to remember that nut that you left when you took home the shell.

When she asks you a question, with her eyes piercing yours, you marvel at her retinas. It’s been a long time since you looked into a stranger's eyes and saw the whole world. The slow death of giving a shit about the world seen in another person’s eyes occurred when we let the webcam facing our forehead let us settle into the comforting gaze downward.

The downward gaze though, the averting from her eyes, is a thermostat set always to 72 degrees.? We don’t notice our comfort until we are outdoors and the heat spikes to a blistering 80 or the wind comes with a chill of 60 degrees and we shudder, looking for the indoors.

In a subtle way, this aversion continues to keep us indoors. We rationalize the cost of going outside. We are OK here inside. We can do this alone. We don’t need to be with people in the way we once were. The costs are too high. The cool is too cold. The look was too uncomfortable.

So we’ll stay home and take an ice bath instead.

Screw that.

NOW IS THE TIME TO BREAK FREE OF THE HABITS OF COMFORT AND VIRTUALITY.

Meet the ascent of the artificial with a leaning into the real.

Grow a garden, even if it be small, so that you dirty your hands.

Fold shut the laptop and find two eyes to peer into.

Stop trying to do anything alone and remind yourself that you are a link in a chain.

Come to Santa Monica in November to be with me for four days. Let us bask in the glory of our interdependence, our physicality, our likeness, and our differences. Let us make each other uncomfortable, not as a proxy for the world we inhabit, but as an honoring of what we are here to be and to do.

My promise to you is that immersion in four full days of practice in the possibility of power through love will make you a light in this world - a light that will bring others with you from their slumbers of comfort and artificiality into the enlivening struggle of the world of the real.

Paradoxically you will find that when you immerse yourself in the world of the real, the struggles you find there will be accompanied by a relaxing of your mind. In the same way that the struggle within occurs in the space of not-much-happening out there, when there is a true struggle without, there comes peace within.

See you in Santa Monica.

Loving you, John Patrick Morgan

PS - The early bird offer has ended. However, if you comment below sharing how you can relate to what I’ve written here, I’ll give you my personal coupon code for 10% off.