We’re just going to die.
We’re all just going to die soon...
or not soon... maybe.
But what if this is your last year,
what would you do then?
And I asked myself the question,
‘What would it look like if I lived one year
as if this year might actually be my last year?’
I don’t know why I’ve got these ideas and questions.
But I need to just live these questions and see what comes from it.
And that is my human experience.
What makes us all human? Hmm...
I think the little voices in our head.
Every human has these little conversations with themselves.
Sometimes very good chats.
Sometimes very destructive, bad thoughts.
When the mind gets so overwhelmed and cluttered
you’re so absorbed into what’s happening in your emotions
and it’s difficult to take your mind outside of yourself.
Then I decided that I would build myself a personal safe space
that I can retire to when I feel overwhelmed.
This place has brought so much to me
in that space of being uncertain and not knowing what to do.
So this was a big medicine I guess.
Like a healer in a way.
Maybe I’ve learnt through my 38 years
that I can get most out of ‘this’...
my life, my being...
when I’m in a space where I feel light.
And the thing that makes me feel light easiest
is when I am kind and sympathetic to myself, my situation.
When I really felt the need to be extra kind to myself
is when I was in the darkest spaces,
going through a divorce.
My life was quite intertwined.
We as a couple were very intertwined.
The more attached you are to something,
when that gets taken away, that is where the pain comes.
That is where there is a deep fear of loss.
Your identity or your structure that you have built around you,
you see that it’s not as ‘vas’ (permanent) as you thought it would be.
You have to almost rebuild a new identity
if you go through a big shift in your life.
That almost forces me to ask myself honestly,
‘Who are you and’
‘what do you want to do with your time that you’re alive?’
What does life look like
if I am in tune with that raw essence of Jeremy?
What do you know is definitely true about you?
What is not just scripts and patterns that you’ve added,
or that society or yourself moulded into?
If I strip everything else away, that’s the one part
that I’m not willing to let go of.
That’s the one part that
I want to have with me until the day that I die
and feel like I’ve been true to that essence.
If I can be strong enough in myself
to put the authentic me out there,
and if it’s accepted then I just feel that love.
But if it’s not accepted then I can also just
deal with the little uncomfortability and pain that that maybe brings
but know that I don’t have to take that onto myself.
It is a space that has a lot of potential to also hurt
because you are vulnerable.
I am so fortunate that I stay now
in such an amazing nature space.
For me this is ways to really sit with pain,
to not surpress it, but rather find an environment where
the pain or the heaviness gets neutralised.
And for me, a lot of times, that is nature.
It’s not all people that have this.
There was a time that I felt guilty about having things.
And that actually led me to not using it.
And if I don’t use that
am I really honouring my privilege in a way?
For me, it does so much good
if I can just be in a space outside
and connect to the basic sensations that’s around me.
It grounds me.
But it makes me feel small.
There is like this awe happening.
And there is something said for that feeling...
I feel small and very vulnerable.
But also very safe because I feel part of everything.
If I had to die now,
man I had a good year.
I still worked and planned and processed, and had very difficult times,
like very difficult times.
But it just feels like that is so part of it.
Because I think pain shows you so much.
Pain shows what could still be healed or what is in there.
Pain and pleasure both have an amazing ability to guide you
to really understand who this essence is that I am seeking.
The full picture of my inner being.
I don’t want to take pain away.
My hope is to rather just see the bigger picture.
These are all together...
pain, pleasure, life and death.
It needs to be there somehow.
Thank you pain. Thank you pleasure.
Thank you life. Thank you death.