“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.
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.
“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.
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, and calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.
—Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
The Ego is Bad
The ego is our false self. It’s an illusion that we carry. It’s invisible, formless, and boundaryless—an idea of who we think we are. This idea of self has been developed rigorously over our developmental years between childhood and adulthood.
It’s characterised by masks, labels, images, and judgments handed down to us by parents, teachers, media, friends, and society. When we don’t scrutinise them, all those paradigms calcify into limiting and self-defeating beliefs.
And so we create the masks that we will wear throughout our lives.
Because we are unaware of this false self, this mask, we become comfortable in it. We build our entire lives around it. The ego then creates ways and means to remain relevant, dominant, and fully nourished, as it needs constant validation and identification with a form.
However, its growth directly opposes any inner peace and harmony. We might feel because it actively conceals our truths. Manipulative, it often creates a false and fickle self-worth.
The ego represents the sum of all our fears, worries, and negative thoughts; it provides the incessant inner voice of doubts, holding us back from any opportunity for wonder, intuition, or awe that might come our way.
If we wish to step into our unique power and authenticity, we must transcend the ego and find where our truths reside. We can do so by becoming aware of the false masks we wear that lead to our egoic behaviour.
The Ego is NOT SO BAD
However, ego is a necessary tool along our self-discovery journeys. How can we be authentic when we have no basis for comparison? How can we be good if we can’t measure against bad? How can we shed light when we have no practical understanding of darkness?
The ego is the yang to authenticity’s yin. It allows us to compare. It defines our sense of self, clarifies our boundaries, and develops our personalities. It pushes us to do, be, and see.
It protects us from being used or abused by stronger, darker egos and shields us from harm caused by our social environments.
Do we need to eliminate ego totally?
Here’s a better question: “How can we learn to tame the ego and begin our journeys to authenticity?” We should accept and honour the ego as a gift; it pushes us to go out and play, explore, experience, and test our limits. It leads us to mistakes, failure, and pain, but that’s where the greatest lessons lie. We need to be in darkness before we can recognise and shed light.
I came out alone on my way to my tryst. But who is this that follows me in the silent dark? I move aside to avoid his presence but I escape him not. He makes the dust rise from the earth with his swagger; he adds his loud voice to every word that I utter. He is my own little self, my lord, he knows no shame; but I am ashamed to come to thy door in his company. ―Rabindranath Tagore
“Whenever I climb, I am followed by a dog called Ego.” —Nietzsche.
“No, I don’t think that’s what happened,” I said.
“Yes, it is. It can’t be anything else,” my friend responded.
The conversation was getting quite heated now. I was shaking my head and telling my friend that he was utterly wrong. We’d been arguing for a few minutes about the ending of Games of Thrones (GOT) Season Two until he finally got the scene on YouTube and proved I was wrong.
I knew he was a GOT buff. So, why did I continue arguing to prove I was right?
That’s how our ego can get in the way.
Another time, I criticized a young employee at work for the lack of preparation for a meeting we were just about to start. I was right in being angry but wrong in berating her in front of others. For the rest of the meeting, she kept to herself and didn’t dare open her mouth.
Syarafina Yusof on Unsplash
Criticism is sometimes essential to motivate and correct. However, it becomes devastating in its effect when it’s done solely to condemn.
Again, that was ego in play.
What is the ego?
I will not offer the psychological definition (developed by Freud and Jung) here but will instead look at its pragmatic meaning.
Deepak Chopra says, “The ego…is not who you really are. The ego is your self-image; it is your social mask; it is the role you are playing. Your social mask thrives on approval. It wants control, and it is sustained by power because it lives in fear.”
Eckhart Tolle defines it in another way, writing, “All you need to know and observe is this: Whenever you feel superior or inferior to anyone, that’s the ego in you.”
The ego is our false self. It’s an illusion that we carry. It’s invisible, formless, and boundaryless—an idea we have of who we think we are.
This idea of self has been developed rigorously over our developmental years between childhood and adulthood. Unfortunately, it’s characterized by masks, labels, images, and judgments handed down to us by parents, teachers, media, friends, and society.
When we don’t scrutinize them, all those paradigms calcify into limiting and self-defeating beliefs. And so, we create the masks that we will wear throughout our lives.
Because we are unaware of this false self, this mask, we become comfortable in it. We build our entire lives around it. The ego then creates ways and means to remain relevant, dominant, and fully nourished, as it needs constant validation and identification with a form.
However, its growth directly opposes any inner peace and harmony we might feel because it actively conceals our truths. Manipulative, it often creates false and fickle self-worth.
The ego represents the sum of all our fears, worries, and negative thoughts. It provides the incessant inner voice of doubts holding us back from any opportunity for wonder, intuition, or awe that might come our way.
Do we need the ego?
The ego is a necessary tool along our self-discovery journeys. How can we be authentic when we have no basis for comparison? How can we be good if we can’t measure against bad? How can we shed light when we have no practical understanding of darkness?
Ego is the yang to authenticity’s yin. It allows us to compare. It defines our sense of self, clarifies our boundaries, and develops our personalities. It pushes us to do, be, and see. It protects us from being used or abused by stronger, darker egos, and it shields us from harm caused by our social environments.
Do we need to totally eliminate ego? Not at all.
We need to learn to tame the ego and begin our journeys to authenticity. We should accept and honor the ego as a gift; it pushes us to go out and play, explore, experience, and test our limits. Of course, it leads us to mistakes, failure, and pain, but that’s where the most important lessons of life lie.
We need to be in darkness before we can recognize and shed light.
Transcending the ego
If we wish to step into our unique power and authenticity, we must transcend the ego and find where our truths reside.
I observed the most significant changes in my behavior when I recognized that the ego was another part of my whole self. Only when I understood how this little devil showed up in my life did I genuinely become self-aware.
The ego has been with us since childhood, and it doesn’t want us to change. Instead, as we saw earlier, it gets its validation externally through our self-images, achievements, and possessions.
It never seeks validation within: “Am I satisfied? Have I become a better person? How am I serving humanity?” The more I asked those questions and dug into my answers, the more clearly I saw how my ego was playing out. And, as I questioned my every action and reaction, I started to see how my ego was bossing me around and suppressing my real essence.
A Course in Miracles, written and edited by Helen Schucman, explains, “Your mission is very simple. You are asked to live so as to demonstrate that you are not an ego.” If you do not possess a deep, rich sense of yourself and your purpose in the now, it is probably because you believe you are only your ego.
At first, I would reflect on my day’s behavior and clearly see my ego at work. Later, I became aware enough to stop myself from reacting in such selfish and egotistic ways.
Why did I need to win the argument with my friend?
Following my evolutionary instinct, I had to validate my ego and its behavior. The ego needs to win every battle. No matter its usefulness. It was built to make us survive this life and make sure our species, group, and family stay and propagate throughout life.
It is up to us to regulate and direct the ego towards the battles that truly matter.
As you continue your day, observe your ego at play. Don’t let it take control of you.
Two people have been living in you all your life. One is the ego, garrulous, demanding, hysterical, and calculating; the other is the hidden spiritual being, whose still voice of wisdom you have only rarely heard or attended to.
