Adversities/Struggle Archives

It’s Not Money But Being Useful That Makes Us Happy.

Meaning, Purpose and engagement with life = Happiness

“I’m fed up with life. I feel miserable. It’s like everything is against me,” he said, “my doctor has had to up the dosage of my anti-depressants.”

Listening to my friend talk about his hardships made my blood boil. This guy had everything going for him—money, a great wife and kids, several homes all over the world, a burgeoning business and good friends around him.

Images of his last holiday to the Maldives, the one thousand euro wine bottles he often drank, and the Rolex watches he wore flashed through my mind.

I immediately judged him for being entitled, spoiled, and not grateful for the life he had.

To me, he was in the top 3% of people alive. So how can he dare complain? Talk about living a privileged life in a world where the disparity between the elite and the rest is at its highest ever.

Finally, I couldn’t sit through his monologue. “Oh, please. You have so much goodness in your life. I don’t think you can complain, as I can’t about the privileged life we both live.”

He looked at me with a scornful smile. “Just because I have money—the money I made with my own two hands—doesn’t mean I have no right to vent about not being happy. We all have different battles to fight.”

Of course, he was right. I had no right to judge. He had created his successful business independently and invested his money wisely. Just because he was rich didn’t mean that I could assume he had to be happy as well.

The next morning, after journalling and examining myself, I realized many people had probably used the same argument against me during my midlife existential crisis in 2008.

I was well-off, healthy and had good relationships around me, but I was depressed only to go see a psychiatrist who prescribed anti-depressants to me.

I recoiled at how I must have sounded, too.

I texted my friend a long apology and decided to work on my issues instead and write this post, hoping he would read it.

None of us has the right to judge, question, or criticise people who are genuinely unhappy for whatever reason. We have no right to dismiss their pain or differentiate pain according to some hierarchy.

Pain is pain. Unhappiness is unhappiness.

Yes, we often need a dose of reality to awaken us and see that we are not in such dire circumstances. But what if he can’t? What if he can’t see a way through? What if all the trauma he’s suffered as a kid was finally catching up on him? (We’ve all suffered trauma, whether it’s low-key or heavy.)

I wrote in my journal that I needed to be more compassionate, understanding, and supportive of anyone who has had the guts to express their pain and not hide behind masks.

I’m regularly hard on myself, too, often dismissing my own pain as insignificant compared to others’ misfortune. I also needed to be more self-compassionate.

I believe that pain and suffering are alarms raised by our physical and emotional bodies to signal that not all is well. They nudge us to start asking questions about our mental well-being.

What traumas and unanswered questions have we ignored? Pain can become a gift, but only when we see it as a hurdle to overcome rather than a block. It is a gift if you see it as the point where the universe pushes you to change your road map.

We live our lives just like a rocket going to the moon. It is, of course, about 95% of the time – and it gets there only because of constant, tiny re-adjustments along the way.

The ‘Gifts of Adversity’ are those things that seem like detours but turn out to be tiny adjustments that help guide us to our destination. They start off as little hints and then become stronger messages, and if you continue to ignore them, they finally hit you hard as adversities.

When we start digging into our psyche, we notice how enslaved we are by our ego, which has paralyzed us with fears, self-pity, and resentment. We see that our old ways of living are not serving our new ways of being.

Back in 2011, in a one-on-one coaching session with Bob Proctor, I explained to him that I’d felt ambivalent about my life, as I had made money but wasn’t happy. He said, “Then it’s time you challenged yourself and played a bigger game.”

Perhaps, after making so much money, my friend needed to find something new and purposeful to do.

Sebastian Junger’s quote from his book Tribe comes to mind: “Humans don’t mind hardship; in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

From the way we treat our bodies to the way we connect with people, we need to have meaning, a purpose, and some big intentions regarding how and what we want to create with our lives.

Below are the hard questions I asked myself to get myself out of my disheartening time:

What keeps me in the highest vibration all the time?
Is my business really what I want to do now?
Are the relationships I have serving my real truth?
What are my unique gifts?
What am I here to do?
How can I serve humanity?

Without my friend’s sad, expressive words to himself and us, it’s easy to avoid those big questions, even when our bodies and energy levels have been whispering them for months.

Living consciously means making ourselves feel necessary like we’re an important cog in the universe’s constantly moving wheels.

Because we are the universe.

Lost in Distraction.Languishing in Life.

Lately, I’m feeling restless. My mind is everywhere. I can’t focus for long on any task. What makes it worse is that I feel down whenever I don’t concentrate on the given task.

These glum feelings are low-key, more like a decrease in positive emotions and not outright negative ones. Perhaps the new term, languishing, describes these feelings perfectly.

Languishing entered our lexicon sometime after the Covid pandemic, which generally means a pullback from life and not being fully engaged. But also importantly, not depressed or very sad.

Maybe, Ironically, an Instagram version of depression.

I retraced my behaviour—that’s why journaling plays an important role in my life—and found that for most of 2023, I’d start my mornings with Twitter (Now X) and the internet instead of a book.

With the constant toxicity on the platform—the squabbling between opposite views on the several wars happening in the world, the slanderous rumours about my football team and the many idiots boasting how they have accumulated 100k followers, I was a wreck before my day even started.

Definitely Not what Thich Nhat Hanh had in my mind about a mindful morning.

One morning, I saw it clearly. I have an attention span of a toddler. What happened to my four-hour writing sessions?

I suspected that there was something broken in our collective attention. I see this lack with my colleagues in our team meetings. I see it with my children and friends when everyone is on their phones instead of engaging in meaningful conversation.

But I never thought it could lead to me becoming a fidgety, restless soul who was walking away and not towards the inner peace and freedom I craved.

Attention is not like a beating heart that comes naturally to us. It’s similar to our muscles. It’s adaptable and versatile but will atrophy if we don’t use it. Neglect it, and it slowly withers away.

Ted Gioia, in his fantastic article, said: “The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s not art or entertainment, just ceaseless activity. The key is that each stimulus only lasts a few seconds and must be repeated.”

With our attention fragmented, everything has become superficial and instantaneous. Tech Startups have replaced old-age companies. Blog posts are read more widely than books. Social media has overtaken TV. YouTube and TikTok instead of worthwhile movies. Ozempic and not ‘good eating’ is fast becoming the answer to losing pounds.

The worst of all is our connection with each other. We don’t meet face to face. Instead, most are on dating apps, gaming platforms or social media, where nothing deep about anyone can be revealed. How you look and what you wear and possess make you more interesting than what you think or say.

I always recall what Richard, my MFA tutor, told me back in 2017: to write well, you must “Stay narrow, go deep.”

Without going deep into anything, whether it’s a conversation, a movie/book or a problem at work, we don’t truly engage, and we are left with a feeling of not enough—we get spurts of laughter and happiness but no true joy.

Nothing deep can be reached quickly, and nothing meaningful is easily achieved.

Our challenge is that the smartest people on this planet are working on hijacking our attention. They’ve understood what lies under attention.

It’s the neurotransmitter dopamine. It’s not a pleasure chemical as it’s often touted to be, but more about the pursuit of pleasure.

Dopamine is a molecule of more. It activates our desire circuits from within. It flags the appearance of anything that can help us survive. It makes us want it right now, not caring if we genuinely want it or not. The smell of a cinnamon roll makes me stop and buy one, even when I’m full.

Dopamine wants to ensure you survive. So it’s telling you to take that reward now as you never know if it will be available again.

So, what’s wrong with surrendering to the dopamine ride?

In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke explains that when we experience an influx of dopamine (pleasure), our body must immediately follow it up with a painful crash so that it regulates itself back to normal.

Scroll on social media for too long, or eat the doughnuts that look so yummy, then you’d feel irritable, anxious and lack the motivation to do anything.

But what makes all of this even worse is the fact that, like being addicted to cocaine, we need more dopamine to get back to our original state—we are in a constant place of ‘not enough.’

If you agree with me that we are losing the fight against the tech geniuses, the question then is, how can we fight back?

These are some ways I’m reclaiming back my attention:

Mornings are sacred. No social media or internet during my early hours. I leave my phone in another room and read while drinking my coffee. I then journal/write.
I’ve quit Twitter. I go on Instagram and LinkedIn only in the afternoons and never in the mornings.
Single-tasking: Doing one thing at a time. Recently, on a business trip, while taking the elevator down to the reception, I didn’t get my phone out and order an Uber. Instead, I conversed with the other guests and checked out before ordering it. Yes, I waited an extra 5 mins for the Uber to come, but it felt good to do one thing at a time. It was a small but albeit worthwhile win.
Walking without listening to music or a podcast. (Not as easy as it sounds)
At work, I’m now closing my laptop for a few hours and just wandering around, talking with team members.
I’m having more one-on-one conversations both at work and with people that I care about. (Hint: Sav, I’m still waiting for you to make time for me this week.)
Committing to all the mindful activities—walking, reading, writing, yoga stretching, being in nature, playing Padel —that the self-aware preach. Remember, attention is a muscle that atrophies.

What Comes Out When Life Squeezes You

Wayne Dyer was speaking at an “I Can Do It” Conference when he brought out an orange and asked a bright twelve-year-old what was inside it. The boy insisted it could only be orange juice, not apple or grapefruit juice. When pushed to explain why, the boy said: “Well, it’s an orange, and that’s what’s inside.”

Wayne Dyer nodded and then looked at the audience to ask if it was you.

“What comes out when life squeezes you? When someone hurts or offends you? If anger, pain and fear come out of you, it’s because that’s what’s inside. It doesn’t matter who does the squeezing — your mother, your brother, your children, your boss, the government. If someone says something about you that you don’t like, what comes out of you is what’s inside. And what’s inside is up to you. It’s your choice.”

Reflecting on myself, I saw that not everything that’s inside me is as pure as I want it to be.

When I went mad at the taxi in front of me, who was driving as slow as ten mph, it was only because of the pent-up frustration within me. I often feel that I’ve been living in a country and a place that’s just too comfortable for me. I need more novelty, urgency, and aliveness in my life.

The taxi driving slowly is just a metaphor for how I live my life. I end up screaming at the driver, overtaking him and speeding away. Fast-forward a few months, driving on that same road, I see that same taxi in front of me. Now, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Or when I belittle someone at my company for making an honest mistake, then it’s all about the fears inside of me. The stakes are high, and I know that one mistake could mean we can’t pay salaries or our suppliers come the month’s end. I have a hard time facing uncertainty. I need to learn to accept that not everything will be under my control. Also, to remember that the company has survived far worse times than now.

Most of our negative reactions are not about the people who irritate us but more about what is troubling us from the core.

Dyer continued:

“When someone puts the pressure on you and out of you comes anything other than love, it’s because that’s what you’ve allowed to be inside. Once you take away all those negative things you don’t want in your life and replace them with love, you’ll find yourself living a highly functioning life.”

Whenever we overreact, then it’s an opportunity for us to step back and ask ourselves what’s really inside of us. What have we allowed to get inside of us, and what can we do to remove all the negative things we don’t want in our lives and replace them with love?

The Biggest Fight of My Life

Source: Substack

“There’s a guy in my head, and all he wants to do is lay in bed all day long, smoke pot, and watch old movies and cartoons. My life is a series of stratagems, to avoid, and outwit that guy.”—Anthony Bourdain

I’ve been thinking of quitting writing altogether. I can feel relief even when I type these words.

For the past six months, I’ve written very little.

After finishing the manuscript for my memoir, The Midlife Shift, in June of last year, I haven’t been able to stick to a writing routine.

The guy in my head has been hyperactive for many reasons. I’ve had to travel so much. My company is proving challenging and demanding a lot of my thinking time. The non-writing aspect of writing has proven nasty.

I’ve never been someone who can write anywhere. Unlike many writers who can write on demand in beautiful cafes worldwide, I have to be at my desk, my space, preferably early in the morning—in my element.

As soon as the morning passes and I haven’t written, I carry guilt and a sense of dread throughout the day. The closer I get to Thursdays, the day I release my newsletter, and I still haven’t written my post, the more anxious, overwhelmed and defeated I feel.

It hasn’t helped me that over the last six months, the first publishers of my memoir went bankrupt, and the second ones are making me wish they would. Also, there’s the trepidation I feel when I know I must do a lot of marketing during prelaunch, book release and post-launch.

I’ve never been a good self-promoter, quite the opposite, actually. I feel dishonest, almost hypocritical, when I treat my writing as a capitalistic venture—writing to me should be pure. (Yes, I know I’m being naive.)

Perhaps I see my writing as an escape that takes me out of the ugliness of real life and connects me to my soul when everything around me is just ego.

However, as Kahlil Gibran said, “There is no deeper desire than the desire of being revealed.”

Like all human beings, we writers yearn to reveal our true inner selves to the outside world. We want our madness to be seen. To be accepted. To be understood.

So market I must.

Perhaps I’ve romanticised writing too much for my own good, and I need to be conscious that it’s easy for me to fall out of love with writing, especially when life happens, and the unsexy parts of the writing come up.

Moreover, I’m from the business world, a world of ego that slowly drains the energy out of any well-meaning soul. My life is mired in materialism that often sucks me into a bottomless soul-less pit that is hard to get out of.

My writing means my inner world. My soul. My higher self. My connection to God.

That’s why keeping my writing persona will be the biggest fight of my life.

Probably, within the next twelve months, I’ll contemplate quitting again and perhaps write about it again. (Please bear with me.)

In Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy, she recalls a conversation with her ex-boyfriend, Gerard, who’d given up playing the violin as a teenager, though he was exceptional. However, a boy in his class, who was inferior to Gerard and had idolised him, took up the clarinet.

The boy’s lack of talent was a joke between Gerard and his music friends. While the boy grafted, Gerard, with all his instinctive ability, abandoned the orchestra to his parent’s despair. In the last term of school, the boy was the soloist at the school performance of Mozart’s concerto for clarinet. A few years later, Gerard saw the boy’s name on a flyer for a concert at Wigmore Hall. Today, the boy is a famous musician.

The moral of the story, Gerard told Cusk, was that we must pay attention not to what comes most naturally to us but to what we find most difficult.

At present, the greatest minds are working to distract us, pacify us, and make us more conventional. They want to relieve us from doing the HARD THINGS.

Writing doesn’t come easy to me. I envy those who write anywhere and at any time.

To keep my writing hat, and my sanity, I keep reminding myself of these maxims below:

If it’s easy, don’t do it.
If it’s hard, then go for it.
If the voice in my head comes up with an excuse, just tell it to shut the Fuck up.
Recall the joy I feel when writing constantly.
Read great writers like Cusk.1
Write early in the morning. At that time, my soul is still reachable.

And most of all to remind myself that I’m fighting the biggest fight of my life

How Alain De Botton’s Densification of Time Can Lengthen Our Lives.

2015 was one of the saddest of my life as my mother passed away. However, it was also one of the most exciting years of my life, as I had intentionally set it up to be so. I wanted to do more joyful activities that made me release the handbrake within me, allowing me to express more of myself.

It was a remarkable year and remains etched in my mind and heart.

Contrary to what I’d thought, time didn’t move quickly; instead, it dragged unhurriedly.

Till today, I can recall most of the experiences of that year as if they happened last week.

I can still feel the heat from the hot coal I walked on with my son when we attended Tony Robbins’s four-day event, “Unleash the Power Within,” in London.

I still recall the joy of visiting my then mentor—Kahlil Gibran’s mausoleum in Bsharii, Lebanon, after spending the previous months reading and getting inspired by the Lebanese-American writer, poet, and philosopher who explained life’s most searching questions with simple, lyrical prose.

There was also the small matter of my TEDx Accra talk in April, which, till today, makes my knees wobble with both fear and excitement.

Time is just a strange dimension. It feels longer, denser and more intense when we do novel and meaningful stuff.

So we need to ask ourselves not how many years we can add to our lives but how we can slow it down so that we live more fully, intensely and meaningfully.

Alain de Botton makes the point more eloquently:

“One of the most basic facts about time is that, even though we insist on measuring it as if it were an objective unit, it doesn’t, in all conditions, seem to be moving at the same pace. Five minutes can feel like an hour; ten hours can feel like five minutes. A decade may pass like two years; two years may acquire the weight of half a century. And so on. In other words, our subjective experience of time bears precious little relation to the way we like to measure it on a clock. Time moves more or less slowly according to the vagaries of the human mind: it may fly, or it may drag; it may evaporate into airy nothing or achieve enduring density.”

Exercise, sleep, and good eating habits could make us live longer. Still, more importantly, they support us in living a better quality of life.

However, the true secret to enjoying our time on earth is to mimic our childhood, when everything is new, exciting and possible.

We want to replace the drudgery, familiarity, and comfort we seem to have after childhood with more novelty, adventure, and self-expression.

De Botton explains: “The more our days are filled with new, unpredictable, and challenging experiences, the longer they will feel. And, conversely, the more one day is exactly like another, the faster it will pass by in a blur.”

True, we can celebrate centenarians from Okinawa and other Blue Zone areas and learn from their good habits to live longer lives. We can also eulogise great people like Alexander the Great and wonder how his life must have been after conquering the world at 32.

However, life is not always about being glorious and attempting incredible feats like scaling Mount Everest, swimming across the English Channel, or creating a billion-dollar company.

Instead, we need to become artists and notice properly with our eyes open, savouring time.

We might live to be a hundred and still feel it all went too fast. Instead, we must aim to fill our days with adventure, appreciation, and awe that children naturally understand.

Not only must we become more mindful of our lives, noticing and appreciating life, but also follow creative pursuits. Self-expression, creativity, and writing for me make me sit up and notice life much more.

Writing in my journal daily allows me to think not only of my place in life but also of life in general. It slows me down, allowing me to pause and remember people’s faces, hear what they said and feel what they felt.

I can picture the black crows circling in the sky with extraordinary vividness.

I can notice the different phases of the moon. The sunsets. The density of the clouds.

Most importantly, when I’m writing, I dare to ask questions that connect me to my soul and to something much larger than myself—a humbling experience that is both grounding and illuminating.

If you want to live longer, eat kale, sleep 8 hours, exercise every day, but also start noticing the wonders of this world.

5 Insights That Made 2023 a Year of Growth

“The world is the true classroom. The most rewarding and important type of learning is through experience, seeing something with our own eyes.” ~ Jack Hanna.

Approaching the end of the year, I like to review it so that I can reflect and start the new one with a bang. Doing so helps clarify what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons I learned.

We might read a great piece of advice that has the potential to work miracles in our lives, but until we internalise it or relate it to our own experience, we won’t trust it.

The best way to learn is through experience. Unless we absorb an emotion as a lesson, it will never become wisdom, rather remaining as abstract knowledge parked somewhere out in the ether.

These are the five lessons the last year has driven to my core:

1) My Life and Goals won’t end on New Year’s.

I now look at goal-setting not as a mere one-, two- or three-year plan, but rather more like a 20-year life plan. I think more in terms of creating systems than setting goals. With these systems, I’m doing something on a regular basis that makes me better and more content in the long run, regardless of immediate outcomes.

I don’t get the instant gratification that achieving a goal can give, but I also don’t carry the stress of not reaching a goal.

My ultimate aspiration—and one that I will pursue endlessly and ruthlessly—is to become a writer who earns enough money from writing to cover a comfortable lifestyle. I’m giving myself as much time as possible, as I know it’s not something I’ll achieve within the next few years.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying the journey of transitioning from a business owner(and all the stresses it brings) to becoming a full-time writer (and all the stresses it brings) and using its fire to power on in my life.

2) Health is Everything.

If you had told me health matters when I was under 40, I would have nodded politely but shrugged it off the same way most people shrug off global warming—yes, it’s a problem, but not mine, and I have more pressing issues.

However, as I’ve hit my 50s, I get it; it affects me in the now. It’s less about dying early and more about living well until I die. In the past few years, I can’t remember a week where I haven’t had some pain or mild distress, whether it’s from trying some exercise I shouldn’t or not warming up my muscles well enough. Or I’ll have gastrointestinal and digestive problems from eating badly, drinking excessively or binging on sugar.

These minor health issues, though not deadly, wreak havoc on my mind, and I end up spending many hours like a zombie, unable to do any of the things I want to do. They quickly lead me to despair and often take me down the dark road of melancholy. I could swear that every time I’ve suffered such emotions, I could trace them back to a failure in my body—some health issue.

3) Embrace Simplicity.

I can still feel the overwhelm that has overpowered me in the last few years. I took on too many projects. I tried to change too many things in my life, and in the end, I lost my way and often my mind.

If we listen closely to our hearts, there is an inherent urge in us to simplify our lives. Fewer decisions mean less energy spent. And so instead of more, we should choose less to help us focus, engage and enjoy those valuable things.

The more we get rid of anything unnecessary, the better we feel. All that extra is clutter—wasteful—and that stands in the way of our inner peace and contentment. By removing the unnecessary, we make room for what is essential and acquire more focus.

What is “essential” differs considerably for each of us. As such, simplifying our lives is a personal and very much subjective endeavour.

Like Zorba, I want to feel “once more how simple and frugal a thing is happiness: a glass of wine, a roast chestnut, a wretched little brazier, the sound of the sea. Nothing else.” (From Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek.)

4) Kaizen and the Power of One Percent Improvement.

Kaizen is a Japanese term that has become famous in the West. It describes continuous improvement through small incremental changes that accumulate over time. It’s used in the corporate world for developing systems and practices, and it’s one of the core principles that Toyota used to become the number one car producer in the world.

We tend to associate change with some large, visible result, like a before-and-after picture of someone who has lost weight in a few months. In reality, however, the greatest shifts occur when we make incremental changes daily. This way, we don’t put too much pressure on ourselves and overload our capacity.

Whether it’s in my business, writing or playing Padle Tennis, I want to remind myself of the power of Kaizen to improve a little every day, every week and every month.

5) We are a Product of our Habits.

Over the last 5-7 years, I set about solidifying the habits I wanted in my life. I called them my “non-negotiables” and committed them to a daily practice. They include rising early, usually just before the sun, meditating for 20 minutes, and journalling for three Julia Cameron morning pages. In the late afternoons, these non-negotiables involve reading for an hour and then writing for at least an hour or a thousand words.

These practices have become the pillars of my daily living—the small bridges to my soul. It’s as if, when I’m doing them consistently, I’m closer to my higher self. I fill up my body with enough soul to be able to live a day in the physical world.

Often, when I’m travelling or on holiday, I somehow manage to stop my daily practice. Without realising it, I close the door to my soul, and my mood transforms from intentions of relaxation and fun to a swarm of negative thoughts.

I then find myself counting the hours to get back to my physical home and my spiritual abode—my daily practices.

These lessons have now entered my subconscious, and I feel I can apply all of them to all aspects of my life. I will do so unconsciously, as they have become part of me. This is what I stand for and how I want to live until I die.

To Want What You Already Have

“Type-A personalities have goal pursuit as default hardwiring. This is excellent for producing achievement, but also anxiety, as you’re constantly future-focused. I’ve personally decided that achievement is no more than a passing grade in life. It’s a C+ that gets you limping along to the next grade. For anything more, and certainly for anything approaching happiness, you have to want what you already have.—Tim Ferriss.

Last week, I was in New York visiting my daughter. The first few days were great as the city’s energy buoyed me. I would walk for hours, wandering through skyscrapers and enjoying the hustle and bustle of Manhattan. I ate good food, didn’t have great coffee (I never do in the USA), and marvelled at the oddity of it all.

But then, on the fourth day, I started feeling anxious and depleted. I felt as if my soul was slowly leaving me. It told me it would go to sleep until I could awaken it. It said, you know I’m not the one for bright lights, big city. My energy levels went down, and I got a cold and felt miserable.

I could not cope with the general scrambling: restaurant bookings, museum lines, choosing broadway seats, standing in queues for a cupcake, and anything else I wanted to buy. Then there was the constricted space, the suffocation I felt whether in my hotel room, lobby, or restaurant or just out in the busyness of the city.

New York is a beautiful city for aspiring and desiring 20-30-year-olds. But not for me. Not for someone who is in midlife and seeks quiet, inner peace and mindfulness. Not for someone leaving the striving behind and moving on to the second part of his life, that of acceptance.

When I started thinking and writing, inner peace and not chasing achievement would lead to happiness. And that moving towards acceptance and loving what you already have is the start of our journey to be happier. I got a lot of pushback from many around me. Worse, I started to doubt my thoughts.

So, Ferriss, the author of the seminal book The 4-hour Workweek, affirmed my thoughts when he said that wanting what you already have is the way to happiness.

If the Guru of productivity and achievement was tired of striving, then surely all of us must.

Over the past decade or so, during my midlife renaissance, I’ve found that the contentment I seek starts only when I stop striving for things that don’t really matter to me. When I stop rushing around like a headless chicken or when I stop giving a shit about what others think of me.

It all looks simple enough in my journal. It’s also quite doable when I’m in my comfort zone and during the first few magical morning hours. But it is much more complicated when life slowly takes over from the morning and starts directing you like how New York’s energy overwhelmed me.

However, to want what you have also means that we are crystal clear in what we have in the first place.

Twentieth-century French anthropologist René Girard said, “We would like our desires to come from our deepest selves, our personal depths. But if it did, it would not be desire. Desire is always for something we feel we lack.”

What if our desires were not ours—not something that was under our control or something we manufactured? Instead, desire was a social process—it was mimetic. In other words, we want what other people want—This assumption that our desires are all our own and the stories we tell ourselves is what Gerard calls “The Romantic Lie.”

What makes it worse is that we are not always aware that our mimetic desires run below our conscious thoughts and that they rule our thinking and goal-setting. We become concerned with what Girard calls the metaphysical desire: the desire of another’s desire and not the object itself.

Only when we listen to the music of our soul’s whispers can we know what we want. Only when we are satisfied that our longings are right for us can we proceed to the next step of acceptance or wanting what we have.

There is a thin line between doing nothing and being nothing. Between living true to yourself and being passive, allowing life and others to direct you.

There are often bigger themes that we can’t control, but we can’t deny that we all wish to co-create our lives instead of waiting on others or divine intervention.

Oprah Winfrey accepted that she didn’t have the energy or the desire to continue being the world’s biggest TV talk show star and instead settled on moving away from the limelight but still doing what she wanted: running OWN, her recently launched television network. She was not being nothing but doing more of what she loved and less of what didn’t interest her anymore.

This week, I’m staying with my ailing father in the south of Lebanon, where I’m away from work and its pressures, staying in a serene villa with help around me and secluded from the outer world—the kind of break I’d prescribe for myself if I were coaching me.

I know I want that quiet. I know I want to sit on a verandah overlooking the garden with a chilled wind striking my face and neck, smoking a cigar and writing.

During this week, I’ve decided to do nothing. I rise early, read, journal and write. I walk daily and go to the gym. I do some work in the afternoon, but it’s all very casual.

Here, there is no need for action or their impending reactions. No judgements and conclusions. No desiring and striving. When there is no wanting, then there is both quiet and happiness.

During those magical morning hours, I can feel my soul sit beside me, converse and even laugh with me. I definitely want what I have right now: a blueprint for how I want to live my life.

I know I’m in a privileged position to be able to do so. However, we can all design our lives to be what we want if we stop being on that hamster wheel.

” Most talk is just noise. The English word “noise” comes from “nausea”. Say nothing unless it must be said. People will appreciate your silence and know that when you speak, it must be important. Shallow rivers are noisy. Deep lakes are silent. Silence is precious.”—Derek Sivers.

This quiet is a stark contrast to my stay in New York or even when I’m back home and inundated with work, family and society, where I get sucked into the life of striving and running. And that’s when I become annoying, self-centred and miserable.

Now, my challenge is to design my present life with what I want to have when I’m actually in the arena with the pressures of my business, family, and societal life. How can I find that inner peace and yet remain effective? How can I be accepting yet strive for the elements I want?

First, I must clarify all the things that I really want to have.

Wisdom comes from removing the junk, falsehoods, and impediments to clear thinking. Less business, more writing. Less spending, more saving. Less internet and social media, more reading fiction and poetry. Less distractedness and more noticing.

Then, with a less cluttered and more tranquil mind, I can start to want and love what I have.

On Acceptance

I’m honest, reliable, productive, principled, idealistic, orderly, and self-disciplined. But I can also be impatient, self-critical, and judgemental of myself and others. Worst of all, I’m always in a hurry.

My enneagram personality type is 1—the Reformer, perfectionist or idealist. I’m motivated by the need to live rightly and driven by a longing for a true, just, and moral world.

Ones are known as reformers because they want to improve the world. They are gifted at bringing order to chaos and creating structures to help others thrive. They strive to overcome adversity — go after higher values, and always remain honest.

But the Reformer can slip into being critical and perfectionistic. They typically have problems with resentment and impatience. At their worst, they can be rigid, controlling, aggressive, uptight, critical, demanding, and impatient.

I can clearly see the two different sides of me. So, how can I live to be the best version of myself?

I think the first step is accepting myself for who I am—accepting that I can be both good and bad. That the same person who is judgemental today can be loving and compassionate the next day.

I know that acceptance is not an easy concept to understand. It is also one which is saddled with many negative undertones. As Carl Jung said, “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”

However, the wiser I’ve become, the more I recognise that only when I can fully accept myself can I be fulfilled. Ignoring my truths is simply a detour from my authentic path.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”—Carl Rogers

True acceptance starts with self-acceptance. Only when we accept ourselves can we be ready to accept others. The opposite of acceptance is judgment. When we stop judging ourselves and start accepting who we truly are, can we rid ourselves of the worst aspects of human suffering—judging, comparing, resisting, grasping and striving?

Acceptance is loving ourselves unconditionally and resisting the perils of striving for perfection. In accepting and loving our own humanness, we start to do likewise with the whole of humanity.

Whether it’s Buddha, Jesus Christ or Prophet Mohammed, they all endured much struggle and pain to arrive at the self-awareness to accept themselves fully.

Only after that could they have enough self-compassion to offer love and compassion to the rest of humanity, alleviate much suffering, and seal their destiny.

What Acceptance is not?

Acceptance is not resignation. It’s not about being passive and allowing life to happen to us, but rather an active process, a preamble to change and become our best versions.

Acceptance does not mean limiting our possibilities but instead provides room for growth as we focus on our inner music and ignore all the noise that hovers in the background.

The 3 principles we need for Acceptance:

Self-awareness

Self-awareness is the stoic understanding that we can’t change events outside of our control but can only change how we perceive them. The reality is that no event in itself can upset us, but rather how we judge that particular event.

We can’t change the fact that the rains will come in May, and perhaps a devastating flood will ensue. However, we can be ready for it and prepare the best we can.

When we focus only on what we can do, then not only are we happier, but we also become more productive and effective as well.

Mindfulness

However, the problem arises when we can’t decipher between our feelings and that of the objective reality. This is when we need to examine what’s happening inside us with the precision of a surgeon.

Tara Brach explains:

“The wing of clear seeing is often described in Buddhist practice as mindfulness. This quality of awareness recognises exactly what is happening in our moment-to-moment experience. When we are mindful of fear, for instance, we are aware that our thoughts are racing, that our body feels tight and shaky, that we feel compelled to flee—and we recognise all this without trying to manage our experience in any way, without pulling away. Because we are not tampering with our experience, mindfulness allows us to see life ‘as it is.’ “

Compassion

Compassion is acceptance in action. Knowing what we must do is easy but often difficult to practice. Compassion can act as a bridge and make that problematic path easier to traverse.

However, it all starts with self-compassion. We can’t give out what we don’t have. So, if our hearts are empty of love, we give very little even when we give.

Tara Brach continues:

“Compassion is our capacity to relate tender and sympathetic to what we perceive. Instead of resisting our feelings of fear or grief, we embrace our pain with the kindness of a mother holding her child.

Rather than judging or indulging our desire for attention or addictive behaviours, we regard our grasping with gentleness and care.

Compassion honours our experience: it allows us to be intimate with this moment’s life as it is. Compassion makes our acceptance whole-hearted and complete.

When we consider all 3 principles at play, Acceptance doesn’t sound like an act of resignation but rather the most important step towards the never-ending ladder of self-awareness, self-growth and the freedom of being who we must be.

Big Change is Hard

“Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?” ―Rumi

“For someone who keeps talking about positive change, you haven’t changed much,” she said.

“Well, change is not what you see happen in a movie,” I said.

People love to judge, compartmentalise and condemn. It makes them feel better and stronger as if your failure is their gain. However, it was also true that often, ‘who I am’ was not aligned with ‘who I want to be.’

Evolutionary biology has explained that conserving energy is part of our survival mechanism. We seek comfort, routines and certainty, which all make change hard.

If the pain we’re going through does not exceed the suffering we’re willing to put ourselves to change, it won’t happen.

If we don’t want it bad enough, it won’t happen.

My goal isn’t to write a book, create a writing habit and be at peace and harmony with the world. I’ve written several books, write consistently and have many moments of peace in my life.

Instead, I want to be a happy, mindful, contemplative author/thinker, away from affluence and society’s microscope.

From where I’m coming, the transformation I’m seeking is massive. I want to become a new person.

Instead of chasing success, status and money, something I have done most of my life, I crave to be this spiritual warrior who wants less but to be more.

On some days, I feel aligned with that goal, but not on many other days.

This means that I need to question the underlying transformation I desire. To look at it from the big ‘Why’ perspective. Using James Clear’s terminology, the change I seek is not only about changing my outcomes and systems but also my identity, beliefs and worldview.

That is huge.

For most of my 55 years, I have been brought up and lived on a formula that does not fit what I want to be. Success, money, and affluence were the only markers of how to live a good life.

And here is the new me, wanting to do a complete 360-degree change and become the next Rumi, someone who writes, speaks and lives love, compassion and everything that’s good about humanity.

Rumi didn’t start as the 13th-century Persian poet we all cherish today. He was a wealthy nobleman, theologian, and sober Islamic scholar until he met the wandering dervish monk Shams Al Tabriz.

Rumi knew he had met his soul mate as soon as Shams spoke. And Shams knew he had found the star pupil he’d been seeking for 17 years. They retreated to Rumi’s house for almost three months. There, they both touched a godly and inexplicable light source. Each man, with the help of the other, discovered the grace and truth he sought.

After his introduction to the world of mysticism, Rumi awakened and learned everything he could about love — unbounded, compassionate and universal. He would become the most famous son of Sufism and the most-read poet of all time.

Was living like Rumi truly what my soul desired?

I recalled what my psychologist sister once told me: many of her patients came not to change. They wanted her to make them feel better as they continued their old behaviour, nuanced with cosmetic changes masquerading as new behaviour. That’s when she told them the harsh truth that change means you must do the work—a deep excavation to know yourself and what you really want.

Perhaps I was doing just that. Is it true that I want a simple life of peace and harmony? Or was it just something I sought due to the last turbulent years of my life?

Author Parker Palmer has a different way of looking at the question of living truthfully: the central question is not, “Am I living the life I want?” but, as Parker says, “Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?”

Shams didn’t come into my life, but writing somehow did. It released the tension in and around my heart, allowing me to dig deep into my psyche and to ‘know myself’ much better.

It made me notice the world around me, empathise with the people in it, and, most importantly, taught me new ways of being with the heart being central to how I thought.

I’m learning that it’s less about getting this or that and going after the shiny goals like publishing a book, getting 100K subscribers, going on a 10-day meditation retreat and more about adopting new behaviours that align with the new ‘Mo’ that I want to be:

To do more of what I love. (Let’s start with writing.)

To live more mindfully and enjoy the ‘now.’

To live more vulnerably.

To become more intimate with people.

To be more loving and compassionate.

To appreciate and participate in the power of community.

I’m not saying I’m healed or won’t fail again and fall back on chasing numbers and status. By being brave and consistent in all of the above, I’m replacing despair with hope.

When I accept that changing my identity is the biggest fight of my life, that means I’ll reclaim the power within me and bring back my dignity.

It means I’m giving myself permission to live the life I want first and foremost, accepting that it will be messy and that I won’t always feel good.

I will stop waiting for anything or anyone and instead start today with small actions, staying with them long enough so that my new behaviour becomes embedded within me.

That’s when the magic happens.

That’s when I’d feel life pulsing through my veins.

Perhaps it won’t satisfy the naysayers or be exactly Rumi-esque, but it will be the life that wants to live in me.

The Journey to an Extraordinary Life Begins With the Ordinary

Life’s not a race. It’s a journey to savor and enjoy. Ambition–the relentless desire for more–can eat you up.” – Russ Roberts.

I see the beautiful sun disappearing into the horizon, and a sinking feeling overcomes me. There’s a lot that I’ve got to do on my mini-break in Lebanon.

Two days into my break, I already feel overwhelmed and anxious. I’ve yet to do anything towards a long list of things to accomplish.

Here, I was away from work and its pressures, staying in a villa with help around me and secluded from the outer world—the kind of break I’d prescribe for myself if I were coaching me.

I was here to be with my elderly father and, in my many free hours, to focus on Midlife Bliss—my blog/platform to help myself and others find more meaning in midlife.

And yet, I was carrying that same stressful feeling of disquiet when I was not on a break. When I’m running in full pelt to run my business, be with family and friends, fulfil social obligations, and work on Midlife Bliss.

This restlessness that I feel is almost always a mixture of overwhelm and anxiety, further tampered with guilt when I don’t do that task.

Why do I carry this feeling everywhere I go?

Perhaps my expectations are always too high, a cause for misery. But the crux is that I’m a ‘doing’ machine and only feel satisfied when I achieve objectives. I get immense satisfaction when I tick off tasks done. I’m always aiming for Inbox Zero.

I find it hard to sit with pending or unfinished. I crave ‘done’ and certainty, which feeds into an overarching narrative that I’m not enough if I don’t do stuff.

The uncomfortable truth is that I’m never satisfied with the ordinary and always chase the extraordinary.

I know I’m not alone in feeling this way. We’ve all become obsessed with wanting greatness. TV, the Internet and Social Media have exacerbated this social phenomenon in our lives today.

However, the problem is not that we want extraordinary but instead how we have narrowed the definition of extraordinary to a materialistic context. It’s all about doing stuff that often doesn’t match our interests or values.

Why would someone climb Everest if it isn’t their passion, only to put it on their CV and show the world? Or those toiling to get a PhD to have Dr before their names. And many think they’ve found the secret to well-being as they’ve accumulated many cars, watches and homes.

We keep telling ourselves and our children that we must be extraordinary but define it by results only; we’ve created this vast cognitive dissonance where we always feel worthless.

Since repositioning my blog as ‘Midlife Bliss’ a month ago, I have gained several hundred subscribers, which is good. But, I wanted more as I compared myself with other better-known writers on Substack who’ve been playing the game for many years.

In chasing ‘Batman’ status without realistic expectations of how much work and time it would take, I’d also taken the beautiful ordinariness of my life for granted.

The sun slowly rose before me when I was writing this essay while a slight breeze stroked my face and neck. It was an extraordinary few moments. I could feel my soul dance with delight.

And yet, I’d quickly forgotten it until it happened again the next day when I was editing. I took a few moments and a few cigar puffs to savour this time.

“It occurred to me that if I were a ghost, this ambiance was what I’d miss most: the ordinary, day-to-day bustle of the living. Ghosts long, I’m sure, for the stupidest, most unremarkable things.”—Banana Yoshimoto

I realise that my days are filled with ordinary moments that make my day extraordinary. Things like drinking an expresso lungo in the early morning while journalling and listening to Max Richter’s wonderful tunes. Reading Tolstoy and/or his Russian friends. Having deep and vulnerable conversations with friends after a few glasses of ‘Malbec’ Red wine.

Also, the times when I laugh when watching Friends with my kids or banter with my padle partners, especially if I win. Or when I’m in stitches at Sassy when she starts going cat crazy. Then, there’s the joy of walking while listening to an inspirational podcast. The list goes on and on.

Let’s be clear here: I’m not suggesting we chase mediocrity.

Instead, I’m saying that we have defined extraordinary incorrectly, and our actions to become extraordinary are nothing but ways to compete and compare with others. It is simply a way of keeping up with the Jones.

We are leaving our true essence behind in chasing ways to be extraordinary. We are not ‘feeling or being’ our way through the world. We are just doing, doing and doing, trying to escape our experiences instead of respecting them.

However, embracing our normal everyday things makes us lighter, happier, more creative, and more productive. And when we couple that with doing what we truly love for a few hours a day consistently, then extraordinary results will arrive.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to live an extraordinary life by filling my day with ordinary moments.

I will run my business for profit but make the customer central to the business strategy while making our employees happier, even if it means less revenue.

I will build ‘Midlife Bliss’ slowly, looking for the right people who want to engage. I will connect with like-minded people I’m discovering on Substack and other places. Writers like Diamond-Michael Scott, Kevin Kaiser, Jamie Millard whose words have impacted me.

I want to be healthy, injury-free and athletic for a 55-year-old and avoid striving for a six-pack and being controlled by it.

Perhaps I won’t have as much fame, popularity, power and money when I follow the ordinary path, but I will be less anxious and feel less overwhelmed or guilty and instead feel more blissful, like a bird freed from a cage ready to fly over oceans and mountain peaks.

In following the path of the ordinary, I know how extraordinary I will become.