What Are We Even Here For?

My attention fractured from the visual noise.

“That’s it. I’m done.” I thought, as my phone became still after flashing yet another something-semi-annoying in my periphery.

“Where’d that thought go? I swear it was lying around here somewhere.” My internal monologue is so damn loud sometimes.

“What’s going on with that Slack notification? Ugh, I should really put my phone on the other side of the world… or at least the other side of this essay. F off phone. Okay. game on.”

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve done lately is remove things from my plate that weren’t getting done, or even finding a time to have progress made on them.

• That speaker training group I thought made sense

• That friendship from grade school that I thought was part of what defined me

• That outdated college identity that was finding me a peaceful plot in an early grave

The speaker training group

I’ve thought for a long time that there was something special about me. That there’s something special about my story.

• Boy raised by a non-traditional doctor who ate fruit instead of fruit snacks…

• “Ya know, in junior high I had two casts on at the same time from different incidents!? Can you believe it?”…

• Kid in a coma and then off to college (more on this in another essay)…

• I lived in Israel for a year after college to get a sense of my homeland from its epicenter…

• I’ve lived on 5 continents!

BOR-Ring. And self-indulgent. I can do better.

The older I get, the more I realize it’s not what I’ve done but what I do that makes me special. It’s not about who I know myself to be based on who I've been, but how I show up to the reality in front me that leaves my mark on the world.

It’s less about who I’m supposed to be and more about what I do (willing and able), to lighten the load and enliven the hearts of my fellow humans.

All this attention on the past in order to create a future is a false flag, a traumatized mind-fuck on the heart. The only place anyone can actually be is here, now.

Legacy is such a boobie trap. What even da-f*ck is legacy. It’s defined only in your death. You don’t get to enjoy it. It’s a grappling hook to a future you’ll never reach until after you’re dead. Enjoy your life.

More on this in another essay sometime, about the distinction between anchors and grappling hooks.

But, speaking of anchors…

That friendship from grade school

I’d like to think that we all know the type. That one friend who became the friend.

The person with a strong identity who suffered the bullies like you did, but got even by making so much money that it didn’t matter.

He was the friend who was there for me the most when I was in the hospital. He was the friend who invited me to live with him and his family for a summer in college. He was the friend who invited me to move to the west coast after college and work with him.

All of those things happened when we were kids.

All the things that happened after moving to Seattle painted more of a different picture.

Strong identities overwhelm snowflakes, and I’m really not an insurance salesman, or even a business guy for that matter.

But I do love to write – whether it’s stories or music – and what the world needs from me is what the world is going to get, dammit, to the very best of my ability. That is, whatever’s left in my forty-year-old physique.

Outdated identity

I’m not on the footsteps of forty anymore, as I’ve affectionately said for the last year or so. I’m walking through the threshold, wiping the mistakes I’ve sweated out of my pores in my 20s and 30s onto the building’s brick-faced facade before the door frame that is my last glimpse of youth before “I’m in my 40s” is the youngest I’ll ever get to be again.

When my kid was just a few weeks old, I remember him sleeping in my lap while I read a book. I looked down at him and realized that “this” right here was the smallest he’s ever going to be.

Today he’s a boy, no longer even a toddler, and he’s still the smallest he’s ever going to be. Everyday is the essence of what we are now. Not some idealized version of who we’ve been, like my mom in lucid reminisce, or… and this is a big one… some spiritual leader telling his doe-eyed congregants about how they’re supposed to be more like somebody who’s died for them, but no one wrote about for decades until after he died.

It’s all social debt, engineered to create compliance. Like my strong-willed friend who thought he was only doing what was best for me, except, as I realized much more recently, he was doing what was best for himself and letting me define myself by his standards and use cases.

That’s business though, I guess. Blegh.

Closing thoughts

We all get motivation from different sources. Most of the time, it’s our pain. From getting our needs met as babies to getting our pockets filled or our knobs washed as adults, pain eventually becomes the fuel we use to recreate ourselves and redefine our relationships with our worlds.

Transforming misery from pain into fuel for your highest self is the essence of alchemy, and that is what we’re here for.

Thanks for reading!

Author bio: Hi! I’m Joshua Blatman.

I am an Earth school student and teacher, family man, writer, musician, survivor, healer, and psychonaut. I’ve been to almost every state, I’ve lived on 5 continents, and now I’m raising my family in my hometown.

I love to wrestle out meaning and share insights about life with minds behind eyes wide open.

Follow me for more content on my primary socials: Twitter, LinkedIn, and the Wisdom Social Audio App, and the rest of my links and music can be found here.

Thanks! I appreciate it and I appreciate you!