No time to read?  Click here to listen to this article on Spotify

I'm sitting in the same place, looking at the same ocean.

But I'm somewhere else entirely.

The café I’m at is small. Tucked into the village I grew up in.

The same cobblestones. 

The same light hits the same cliffs. 

I can hear the waves from here. The way I always could.

As a boy these were the streets I grew up in.  

But I always felt like a stranger in my own skin.

Kinda frozen. Small. Afraid that if I spoke, I'd be too much. Or not enough.

Quite a lot of the time I preferred to disappear.

Belonging felt like a language everyone else was born speaking, but I'd missed the lesson.

Nothing out here has changed. 

The streets are the same streets. The ocean is the same ocean.

But the boy who walked through them. 

And the person sitting here now.

They are not living in the same inner home.

When I graduated I couldn't wait to get away from here. 

That summer I moved to America. I lived with a host family. A completely foreign place.

But the same anxieties lingered.

I was able to reinvent myself a bit, but I still sat inside the same pool of fear and anxiety. 

I continued my sport, running for the track team. 

I got myself into a really good university for theatre and film. 

I had new friends.

I chased achievements.

But that exhale of relief never came.

That boy's nervous system had followed me the whole way.

Never knowing what I was trying to get away from.

Sure, there were challenges in my childhood. Things going on that crafted my anxious nervous system.

But here's what I didn't understand for years…There was no tiger in the room. 

No real danger, present, in that moment.

My nervous system just didn't know that yet.

It had deduced, early, that the world was unsafe. 

And once that's learned, it doesn't ask for new evidence. It just runs the program that was forged out of that perception.

It's now an old program. 

On a loop. 

In a body that was, by every actual measure, safe.

That's the first piece.

The second piece is sneakier.

Even if the body starts to settle, the mind doesn't like it. 

It needs something to do. Something to scan for. Something to compare itself to.

It will always find a reason you're not quite okay yet.

Not enough money. Not enough security. Not the right relationship. Not enough peace,  ironically, even in the pursuit of peace.

It's not malicious. It's just hungry. 

It was built to want, not to arrive.

So you can be standing in a beautiful village, still being preyed on by a threat that isn't there. 

Run by a mind that will never find a place to settle. 

Right now if you're home, look around your physical place where you live.

What did you do to make it feel good to be there?

Maybe you hung some art. Painted a wall. Choose the furniture with care. Brought in plants or flowers.

And you probably keep it that way. Swept up. Cleaned. 

Put things back where they belong. At least periodically.

You make it a nice place to be.

Most of us do this without even thinking about it.

But there's one home we never decorate. Never sweep. Never bring flowers into.

The one inside you. The one you can never leave, not even for a night.

Would you want to live in the house that is your mind?

For most of us, if we're honest, the answer is no.

Because we're living inside a nervous system that's on high alert. 

Inside thoughts that won't quiet down. 

Inside emotions we never chose and don't know what to do with.

Not because we're broken. 

Just because nobody ever showed us how to tend to that house.

Maybe it's time to open a window. Let some sunlight in.

Maybe even bring in some fresh flowers.

What do you think?

I really tried to escape my inner self for years.

First through suffering; Multi-day races, through rough terrain, pushing my body until thinking wasn't possible anymore.

Then into jungles. Up mountains. Searching for healing in places far away from myself.

I found real things out there. Learned a lot. But it was all reaching to get somewhere. 

Never just to be… here.

A lot of people only really change once “it's bad enough.”

So, in a strange way, I was lucky.

Mine got bad enough.

For a lot of people, life is “good enough.” 

So they stay. 

Rearranging the furniture of their external world. 

Moving in and out of suffering. 

Never knowing there's an incredible garden available to them, not just a slightly different arrangement of the same small room.

Or they do make a change. Just enough to feel different for a while.

Before drifting back to the old, familiar, dingy apartment of their inner world.

Often, I ask people how they're doing.   

Then I follow up with: Where did you go to check?

That pause is always a comparison. To a worry. To a want. 

To some story about how things should be.

With that pause they awaken back in their inner house.

That internal place where we reside.  

And here's the part that makes it slippery.

You see, even when people do turn toward their feelings, their circumstances, toward what's  actually happening in their life, to answer the question, “how are you?”

They're still looking through the mind.

The mind is the one giving the tour. Deciding what's worth noticing, what's a problem, what it all means.

Every search is done from within that inner apartment.

So even the search for peace gets filtered through the very thing that was never at peace to begin with.

So one day you sit down to get quiet. Finally,

And something strange happens.

The quieter you get, the louder “it” gets.

The ego doesn't like silence. Silence is where it has nothing to defend. 

Nothing to perform

Nowhere to hide.

Nothing to resist against. 

You see, it can only exist in resistance to something else.

So it gets creative.

One moment it's the victim. “Why is this so hard for me? Why does everyone else seem to find this easier?”

The next moment it's the victor. “Look how aware I am now. Look how far I've come, while everyone else is still asleep.”

Victim. Victor. Back and forth, sometimes in the same breath.

It's slippery like that.

And here's the real trap…Even trying to find peace can become its newest costume. 

A new performance. A new way to be special, or further along, or finally fixed.

There's no technique that outruns this. No amount of trying that gets you past it.

The only way through is to see it. 

Clearly. 

To sit quietly with it. Without believing whichever character it's performing that day.

I'm sitting here. Same café. Same ocean.

The waves haven't changed. The light hasn't changed.

But I have. 

Not because I finally fixed myself. Not because the ego stopped showing up to perform.

It still does. I just don't follow it anymore.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to get away from this house. 

And started, slowly, tending to it instead. 

Opening a window. Letting in some light. Noticing when the old furniture shows up again, and not rearranging my whole life around it.

Sure, it's not always peace and love in here. But I'm not at war anymore.

And that's enough to make my real home, the one I can't ever escape from, a place I actually want to live.

Maybe yours can be too.

You don't have to race up a mountain to try and find a way out. Of course you can if you want.

You just have to go ‘home.’ And actually look around.

So wherever you're reading this, stop for a second.

Notice the room you're in right now. Not the outer one. The inner one.

Then say quietly. "I’m home."

Not as a fix. Not as a performance. Just as a fact.

That's not the end of the work. 

But it's the door to the garden

And it's open.

—Paul