I’ve been enjoying life as of late. I really have, and not in a way that needs a plot. I feel as if the world smiles at me every morning that I am given the privilege to wake up, blessed once more with an opportunity to right my wrongs. The sun pierces through the branches of the pine tree outside my window and drapes the room in gold. The air smells salty as a light wind draws in from the sea, dancing with my curtains. Life outside is humming with life. Seagulls patrol the skies on their morning raid for scraps. My one neighbour can be heard playing the trumpet. I’m not sure which house the muffled notes come from, but it’s a hallmark sign for the coming of summer every year. He’s not the best, and yet never misses a lesson. After a winter-long deprivation, I get to spend my first instances awake basking in the embrace of the golden rays, just as I was ancestrally destined to do. I’m well-fed, endowed with function, and driven with purpose. I have mouths to feed, and truly, what an honour that is.
I’m not quite sure if happiness or enjoyment appropriately characterises this emotion that I’m experiencing lately. I'd rather opt for contentment. A lulled constant that brings with it no volatility, no eruption of euphoria. I’m not in the clouds per se, but rather planted firmly on a bedrock of both circumstance and my own making. For the first time in my lifetime, there’s little need to drag my feet to remain where it’s pleasant, nor a need to hurry through where I feel discomfort. The ground is beneath my feet where it has always been, and it won’t ask for my permission to be there. It never has. Yet, there’s a caveat to these favourable conditions I’ve searched endlessly for in so many break-of-dawn cold showers and YouTube meditation videos. A caveat that is as humorous as it is irritating. It’s almost as if the key to leaving the metaphorical prison was taped to my back this entire time, and no one bothered to tell me. Simply put, what I was looking for did not even need to be found.
I think it’s best described by Alan Watts in Become What You Are. Paraphrasing from what I recall, Watts goes on to describe the qualities of Tao - the absolute underlying principle of the universe - as being nearly ineffable. Like a mirage that one can feel, but only ever see from the corner of their eye. You could call it peace, natural order, the eternal, or just contentment; either way, it highlights the existence of a boundless presence that, in theory, could be attained. The how, on the other hand, has been a subject of discussion as old as time itself. Watts goes on to explain that the very second we attempt to grasp or even describe Tao, it quite literally ceases to exist. Similarly, in trying to find or achieve presence, one is paradoxically no longer present. This principle finds itself recreated in many aspects of our lives, and no less when we want to go to sleep. If we consciously tell ourselves we need to clock out, no matter how exhausted we are, we will dance around the action, counting sheep and conjuring grand plays on how we should have handled past arguments. Paradoxically, you’ll only manage to go to sleep the very moment you forget to think about sleep. When you are no longer consciously invested in achieving sleep. There's a poetic universality here. What we try to control seems to inevitably slip through our fingers like sand.
It’s funny how something I strived so desperately to achieve for so many years found me unsuspectingly in a sidewalk cafe on a random Tuesday. It took no gruelling ritual, no substance, nor any kind of cognitive effort for that matter. It crept up completely unbeknownst to me, only to dissipate the very moment I took notice of it. However, that brief moment was everything. It was a softness that needed no explaining; a non-conscious belonging in the natural order that demanded nothing from me other than my presence, much like how I’d expect a fish, beetle, or rabbit to live. I did not have to think or act on the part. I had no script, no lines. To some extent, even the concept of myself as an entity was rendered obsolete. At that moment, it just didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, and I say that with joy. Nothing about “nothing mattering” was bad.
I once read an analogy that claimed that boredom was power. Boredom brings with it such a privilege that even God partakes in it, spending endless time disguised as the grass that sways in the wind, the clouds that hang dormant in the sky, or the swarms of gnats that aimlessly hover for hours on a hot summer day.
True presence means forgetting about yourself, and for the first time, I had truly forgotten about my unwritten loyalty to my muse. A self-imposed, romantic partnership with grief that for so long anchored me in purpose.
What may seem like a key to the meaning of life has been anything but a resolution. The act of presence has posed more questions for me than it has answers. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of reason to celebrate bidding farewell to old problems and making space for new ones. In some sense, it’s a sign of growth. The analogy that life feels like a spiral is undoubtedly relatable, but climbing up or down the staircase is still a choice we can consciously make. I’d rather face the same problem ten floors up than spend any more time dwelling on a floor I’ve outlived. I’m grateful that the obstacles that once felt like mountains on my path now look like molehills behind my trail. I’m well equipped to encounter the same vices with a new set of understandings.
Still, not all my foes are familiar. There’s a new contender I’m just getting to know that I haven't quite yet met before. Not officially, at least. It reared its head recently and judged me for being content. It reminded me why I started writing in the first place, and how, without them, I’d have nothing to say. My old muse wasn’t recognisable anymore, but the empty space they left behind germinated a new hindrance.
What happens when your muse no longer inspires you?
My muse isn’t dead, it’s just deciphered. Decoded. Felt. Rationalized. This might be arrogance, and life may humble me quickly for my transgression, but the boundless well that my muse once was has dried up for the season, and instead, I find myself with an empty bucket, sitting on the rim day after day instead of digging my next well. So that’s what this is. It’s me planting the shovel back into the soil and lugging out my first mounds of dirt in hopes of hitting the water again.
I’m making a conscious effort to write at a time when it may feel like there’s nothing much left for me to say. Not because that sentiment is necessarily true, nor a problem to begin with, but because I’m not used to being inspired by positive things. In the world we’re inheriting, perhaps that’s the most important skill to learn.
To be present means to forget about yourself. To forget about yourself means to feel everything. No curation or collaging. Joy is a human emotion just like any other, and in this season I’m holding space for it to breathe and become what it needs to be.
An exquisite reflection breathing with the quiet wisdom of someone who has found peace, and also learned to inhabit it. I like your final observation: the tension between contentment and creativity. That curious, silent fear that joy might dull the blade of inspiration — what Auden once called “the fever of passion, the lover’s rage / for the beautiful not yet attained.” We are trained, artistically and culturally, to worship the muse of ache, to believe suffering is the crucible of truth. But perhaps that’s just a narrative convenience, a romanticism pretending to be realism.
I wonder if joy, especially of the subtle, grounded kind you describe, isn’t a more difficult muse, not less fertile, but less theatrical. Grief demands to be written. Contentment asks to be lived. And yet, I think of writers like Annie Dillard or Loren Eiseley, who drew entire worlds from a morning beam of sunlight or a ripple in a stream. Or of Rilke, who wrote that “everything is gestation and then bringing forth.” Maybe this is your gestation. The water isn’t gone, it’s simply running quieter, underground.
What if inspiration isn’t a fire to be lit by friction, but a stillness to be undisturbed? What if the creative act in seasons of peace is about becoming porous to meaning the Tao you referenced? The art of presence, then, may not lie in forgetting the self, but in no longer trying to control it…
Keep digging, Akif! Still wells sometimes reveal the clearest water.
For so many years, I have seemingly been searching for my Muse, whom I met almost by accident when commencing my midlife journeys to far flung corners of our World, and my mind.
There, amongst the shadows of an Eden longed for since childhood, my muse revealed herself amongst those shadowy recesses, bespangled by iridescent light, and we became one.
For years on my journeys, inward and outward, this memory of her, in that moment of recognition, accompanied my Soul.
Until one day, I found myself prostrate with grief, anxiety, remorse anger and pain.
I came at last to the very end of that journey, how fondly remembered, with a certainty, that I would never return... This state continued for a personal eternity of self loathing, doubt and bitter disappointments.
One day, a miracle happened, I rediscovered my self, not unlike before, setting out in a new direction, my Muse rediscovering me, gently suggesting that we walk hand in hand once more.
Now, Suddenly from these misty pages, misty with the emotion of saying farewell to my loving Mother of 101 years, I have found you again, or perhaps, were you searching for me on these grass bespangled, slopes of our Drakensberg Mountains... Hello Akif... I am truly Happy... Our Safari is long, can we set off now... I have so much to learn from you.. Kind regards... Keith