I drove Wes’s car to Oakland during traffic hour to pick up a gorgeous handcrafted wood meditation chair from Facebook Marketplace. Since moving to San Francisco, I’ve realized I really enjoy being low to the ground, but that’s besides the point.
A few weeks ago, some friends and I watched Ne Zha 2, picked up Kat from the airport, and hung out after. There was talk of ordering late-night food. Kat or Joe mentioned you could get June’s Pizza delivered from Oakland for $40 or something. Apparently, it’s some of the best pizza Kat has ever had. Everyone else concurred, “it’s damn good pizza.”
It’s with this memory in mind that prompted me to check how close my destination was to June’s. 10 minutes. I don’t crave pizza, but I thought of my friends. I sent a text in the group chat and was met with let’s just say an enthusiastic response.
Driving back along Dwight D. Eisenhower Freeway toward the Oakland Bay Bridge, I felt some emotion come up as moisture dabbed my eyes. With the sun’s reflection dancing along the water, the scent of the pizzas firmly secured in the passenger seat hotboxing the car, I couldn’t help but be in awe that “This is my life.” That these are the days I’ve been waiting for all these years without knowing it.
I’ve had many moments like this in the three months since I moved to San Francisco. Moments where I need to close my eyes and pinch myself to ensure I’m not asleep. Morning laps around Duboce Park, playing claw machines with my roommates at Round1, spontaneous Partiful invites from friends, new connections that appear out of thin air. Life is so simple, yet so blisteringly good, beautiful, and true. It’s hard to believe that just a few years ago, I was suffering. A suffering not at the hands of physical ailment or external chaos, but the suffering of living a life that wasn’t mine.
I’m reminded of this Briana Wiest quote Mel showed me:
Waking up to the emptiness of an inauthentic life, I sought fullness in the conventional ways. With humor, I raise my hand as someone who has done the thing of quitting a job on a whim to travel the world. And while I had a seedling of hope that falling recklessly in love would be part of that adventure, it didn’t happen. Instead, I hope to fall in love easefully rather than recklessly; a reflection of the nature of my life right now. I’m slowing down and rooting. I’m at peace with what I have. Even still, life continues to expand.
I’ve realized “recklessness” is often needed to expand our sense of self, and with it, our view of what’s possible in life. However, a gravitational pull keeps us firmly grounded in our habitual ways of being. Like a rocket ship, we need escape velocity to launch us out of the life we’re living. The velocity required will vary from person to person, depending on the density of the psychological conditioning. The same goes for the “size” of the catalyst needed, which leads to the reckless decision. For some, it might be the death of a loved one or an unexpected onset of illness. The loss of a job or breakup after falling recklessly in love. For others, flunking out of pre-med or watching a jarring documentary. Something must disrupt the all too steady plot, something too shocking, unfathomable, and dysregulating to the mind and nervous system that we can’t help but seek “there” instead of “here.”
There was always a “there” for me, even if I convinced myself there wasn’t. It hung out in the background, evident in the distance I continually tried to put between myself and the reality I blamed as the cause of my suffering. And while I experienced a delight and freedom as I jettisoned myself toward “there,” “there” kept drifting further away the closer I thought I was. I had location and time freedom, but got bored with it quite soon. I enjoyed my creative work, but when I tried to do it full-time as I dreamed of, I found I didn’t want to. I shared beautiful moments with strangers, but didn’t make long-lasting friends. I discovered places I love, but didn’t find home.
The truth is, I needed to float. I needed to convince myself I knew where I was going and realize I was hopelessly lost. In that liminality, I stopped trying to hold on and surrendered to what’s always here when nothing else is.
Soul.
As much as we can wake up to the transcendent, we must root down into the soul, the unique expression of transcendence we are. It’s this journey, one of “soul initiation,” as Bill Plotkin calls it, that we chart our course for when we quit our jobs, travel the world, or pursue love with reckless abandon. We search for our souls, the groundless ground that tethers us to everything and nothing. The beautiful thing is that what spurs the search for soul…is soul. As Rumi says, “What you seek is seeking you.”
Certain things unfolded leading up to and during the search, many of which contribute to the deep okayness I experience now. I did the inner work to cultivate a loving relationship with myself. I went all-in on my dreams and realized they were a mirage. I’m grateful they were. They pointed me back to what’s been here “within” me all along.
Home.
Home is more a felt sense than a place, one often nurtured in the furnace of suffering and uncertainty. To be at home with ourselves, intimate with soul, is the real adventure of a human lifetime. When one returns to the inner home, the outer home sorts itself out all by itself — it simply aligns in response to the nature of the inner. We find ourselves landing back on the ground. The atmosphere feels a little lighter. Our way of being in our skin is fundamentally different. Meanwhile, everything else looks relatively the same.
I knew this chapter would be about rooting down to create the conditions for these internal roots to unfold whatever wants to emerge. But I wasn’t (how could I?) conscious of how amazing it’d feel once I did. To have a mailing address. To have friends, not acquaintances. To feel so utterly alive in the simple ways of being. Here in San Francisco, my soul is nourished in a way that differs from my time wandering out there. It’s quiet rather than outspoken. Easeful rather than reckless.
I’m endlessly delighted by the simple things in life. You might think the novelty will wear off, but it hasn’t yet. I’m confident it won’t. The way I am in life, my way of being, has fundamentally shifted. I reconnected with and embodied the easily delighted child that had been forgotten for some time, and I owe a lot of that to the time I took to search for and bring him home.
I’m delighted by self-driving cars. I am in love with California weather. I love how many Asian people are around. I was in San Mateo the other day, and I swear Asian people were in the majority. And the trees here, my god, West Coast trees are something else.
I have everything I could’ve never known I wanted, it just took a journey to get back here. As Marcel Proust said, "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."
Nothing has changed, but everything has.
Beautiful Dennis! Thank you for sharing and inspiring!