Don't you hate it when everything you've been told turns out to be exactly right? When every, “this might help you” echoes in the cave of your head as, “why didn’t you listen . . . why didn’t you listen . . . why didn’t you . . .”
The meditation you should be doing, the exercises you know you need, the morning routine that would get you going, the friends it would make such a difference to keep up with? A million times you have been told, and told yourself, that something like this would make life better.
Today I cycled to the western part of Amsterdam to meet with a pleasant agent of the Dutch government as part of being allowed to stay in the Netherlands. Starting from the cityscape I've been locked down into, I extended my bike trip to ride through a forest and by a lake.
And as soon as I found myself near heavy trees and deep water my whole nervous system began to reset. While the center of Amsterdam is hardly a harsh urban environment and while it was no Amazon I biked through, every part of myself began saying: “More time in nature. Less time with screens.”
The cliche is that change is hard. In part, the internal critic speaks with heavy thoughts. You hear “I am a failure” with too much weight to push it off, feel the rut such thinking digs in your your life. But the coralary are those thoughts which go round and round without ever gaining traction.
So I cycled home with my updated residence card thinking about a book called The Lesson Remains The Same in which every page says one thing like: “listen to what you know,” or “do what would help” or “now you could.”
Day after day. Page after page. Thought after thought.
Now you could.
Let go of weight.
Ride with light.
The echo is a lesson.