Go where you encounter peace.

As a child, time was liquid and I poured it into the vessels of my various pastimes. Hours pass while I weave up intricate daydreams, oblivious to the reality yet fully alive. Nowadays, the hours have instead become the vessels that I feel obliged to allocate portions of productivity into. Nevertheless I remain wide-eyed before creativity, but often finding myself merely admiring from a distance — as though awestruck by its possibility while simultaneously fearful over its fragility. For a brief moment, I begin to wonder if I have been neglecting what's the most meaningful to me to gather dust on the back shelf of my to-do list instead.

I hear the prompting from somewhere within, but I ignore it to consider what feels like a more urgent question in the moment — are pastimes merely a way to pass my time? How could I possibly afford them when there already exist a myriad of pending tasks lingering in the peripheral of my awareness? At a spare moment, the sound of clock ticking amplifies in the background. I feel agitated from the absence of activity, desperate to fill this vacancy with anything at all. I reach for my phone, scrolling through timelines featuring lives that appear exponentially more interesting than my own. The internal chaos magnifies until numbness resides at my fingertips. I do not encounter peace.

Once again I hear the prompting. Finally I arrive before the empty journal pages, attempting to disentangle my messy yarn ball of thoughts and tame the blaring static inside of my mind. Peace re-emerges like a quiet rising tide, a revolution in all its sublety. There is something deeply soothing about an aimless pilgrimage without any defined aim in sight, where I abandon the need to rush through the motions and encounter the reminder — I am here to create and grow, instead of merely to produce. At the border between my being and doing, I unearth an inkling of what it means to be human —setting aside the need to strive after an arbitrary standard.

I want to show up to things sincerely, I scribble across my journal page, not perfectly nor efficiently, just sincerely.