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If you already had everything, what would you do with your day?

What would you spend your time thinking about?

How would you move through your world?

Would your calendar change?

Would your mornings look any different?

I first posed this question while working with someone who, like many of us, was chasing something just out of reach.

She told me, “If I had it all, I’d be on set filming a movie.”

She’s not a famous actress (yet). But she’s deeply committed to her craft and wants to feel like she’s finally arrived.

So I asked, “Why?”

And then I kept asking.

Eventually, she got to it: Security. Recognition. The feeling of having made it.

The sense that she was no longer struggling.

And that’s when we saw it.

Beneath all of our goals and aspirations, beneath the scripts we carry about success and fulfillment, is usually a much simpler desire: to feel a certain way.

To feel safe.

To feel seen.

To feel like we matter.

To have significance.

That’s our emotional core.

The chasing is only there because we want the opposite feeling, right?

We’d only want to feel free, if we felt trapped.

We want love because we feel alone.

We want significance because we don’t want to be forgotten.

Can you see that? If you already had it you wouldn’t need it.

You don’t need something that you have.

Now, I want to give a slight perspective shift: What if it’s the chasing that brings us the comfort not the achieving?

If she achieved the success in acting that she’s after, would she suddenly feel whole and then bask in the feeling of accomplishment for the rest of her days?

Have a think about this:

What would happen if you actually made it to where you’re going?

…Then what?

No busyness.

No constant scramble.

Don’t just picture that one moment, think of the hours or days and weeks after the achievement.

What are you doing minute by minute?

The part we don’t usually think about is how all that turmoil you’ve been outrunning would suddenly have nowhere to hide.

For many people, stillness feels like the enemy—and busyness, the antidote. We use so many strategies to avoid stillness:

We get a dog.

We date someone we’re not even sure we like.

We buy another course to “finally become our best selves.”

We struggle.

We strive.

We grind.

We decorate the hamster wheel… and call it progress.

It might make sense now, why you squirm in meditation. Busyness is a distraction from the deeper feelings we’d rather not touch—like loneliness, grief, or unworthiness.

Feelings we never want to feel… ever.

Here’s the deeper pattern:

In a dualistic reality, one belief defines the other.

The striving fuels the feeling of lack and the feeling of lack is what fuels the striving.

They prop each other up — and therefore one collapses without the other.

The busyness only feels meaningful in contrast to the discomfort it’s helping you avoid.

This is how Lao Tzu puts it in the Tao Te Ching:

When people see some things as beautiful,

Other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

Other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.

Long and short define each other.

High and low depend on each other.

Before and after follow each other.

You see, the busyness numbs the very feeling we’re trying not to feel.  And for a moment, it works. But, relief that depends on distraction is always temporary.

It’s a confronting realization. 

But it’s also the doorway. 

The moment everything starts to open.

Because deep down—far, far within—we’re afraid of actually arriving.

Because without the busyness of solving our worries… we’d have to become someone else.

Someone not defined by the struggle.

Our ego construct exists as a defense mechanism—and to keep existing, it needs the very problem it’s been rallying against to remain unsolved.

One defines the other!

The mind finds safety in the pursuit, not the arrival.

It’s a paradox.

We spend our lives reaching for the thing, that deep down, will leave us lost if we actually attain it.

Exited founders almost always start another business—because arriving is empty without the chase.

I often encourage people to do an honest audit of their time.

Not with judgment. Just to reveal.

Look at how you spend your days and weeks. Because often, what’s on the surface (the calendar) reveals what’s underneath (the chase).

Why are you filling your time the way you do?

It reveals what’s really behind the chasing.

We find safety in pursuit of the thing we think will bring us comfort

Now consider this: 

What if joy with life was meant to come first? We’re taught to chase work that “makes us happy,” but that assumes happiness is a static emotional state—something we can lock in and hold.

It’s not.

And instead of untangling what’s underneath our unhappiness, we keep chasing the next job, the next goal, the next fix.

Forever in an endless loop.

It’s not that you have to stop doing what you’re doing.

We still work hard, we still have to overcome apathy, and distraction. 

She still searches for auditions.

Nothing changes but everything is different.

The pressure that says, “If I don’t book the audition soon, I’m not safe” — that’s just no longer the dominant voice. 

She becomes the person that loves life, every aspect, even the excitement of looking for auditions. 

And is no longer propping up the unconscious identity of a person who’s always searching, always trying to make it, but never feels deserving of arriving.

And when your identity isn’t being propped up by the outcome… you’re free.

It might sound backwards, but once you see it, everything begins to change. You begin to notice the linchpin that’s kept your inner loop in place.

No one’s holding you here.

We are actually free to live fully now.

It’s just that the ego needs the chase to keep itself alive.

With this shift, our relationship with life changes—we begin to trust it, rather than merely survive it.

The joy of life comes from living it—not from chasing a future dream.

There’s a metaphor I read years ago: imagine if every morning, $1,440 was deposited into your bank account…

But you had to spend it all by midnight.

No rollover. No savings.

That’s how minutes work.

Every day, we’re handed 1,440 of them.

And whether we know it or not, how we spend those minutes is an expression of our internal state: our longings, our fears, our subconscious attempts to survive.

What if instead of picturing fulfillment in the future, you entered the feeling now?

Maybe the way you spend your minutes would change.

You might start enjoying them.

Not using them to chase joy—but spending them from joy.

To do that, though—you’d have to let the worry, that's holding up the chasing, collapse and begin to trust life

Zoom out.

We live in the past, ruminating on what’s already happened.

Or we live in the future, imagining what might come.

But how often do we fully trust that life might actually deliver more than we can conceive?

Living now as if I have everything I need?

Rarely, right?

Most of us don’t deeply trust life.

Instead, we build plans, strategies, escape routes— trying to squeeze a meaningful life out of a worldview built on fear.

We cling to those strategies as if our lives depend on them—petrified that if we pause to smell the roses, our future will slip away… the future that we believe will save us from the very feelings we’re avoiding right now.

But what if life had something better in mind… if only you had the courage to let go?

Can you sit with what surfaces in the quiet?

Can you stay?

Stillness feels dangerous because there’s no doing in it.

And doing has always been our antidote.

But you can be still in a busy life.

As the Buddha said: 

“What you cling to causes your suffering.  Let it pass like clouds across the sky.”

Ask yourself: 

“If I had it all, how would I live today?”

And from that space, you might just realize: Joy isn’t the reward. It’s the starting point.

And the pursuit? Just something to do.

But it takes trust.

Not in the plan.

Not in the hustle.

But in life itself.

—Paul

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