I have already arrived exactly where I belong. And part of it is disappointing.
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I said that in public six days ago, and I meant every word of it. By “arrived”, I meant I was exactly where I belonged. That did not mean life suddenly felt better all the time. That was the disappointing part. Pleasure still comes and goes the way it always did, and if it ever stopped moving, I don't think it would register as pleasure anymore.
And just by using the word “arrived,” I am already pointing backward. It sounds finished. The past cannot reach me except through the present, because remembering it is happening now. Even when I am staring backward, the person doing the staring is here. That’s the thread to follow.
Then the other half came into view, in the present moment:
I am still arriving.
Both of those are mine, and I'm not taking either one back.
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What I had pictured, without ever once checking that I had pictured it, was a place. You do the work, you cross the line, and then you are standing in the country called Arrived, and the weather there is different. The work was real. The line was real. I crossed it, and I would not give that back. I wrote about getting sober without a date to point at in I Had to Grow to Fit My Own Shoes, and what I did not say there is that the same trick runs on everything.
“Arrived” is real, but it only describes a moment. The second I call myself “arrived,” that moment is already behind me. I still have to live the next moment. There is no permanent state called “arrived” where nothing changes and nothing else is required of me.
A body is stranger than any of the philosophy. It holds a temperature and a chemistry that the surrounding room does not, and it does so by constantly working on it, with no completion date. Food goes in, heat goes out, things get repaired that nobody ever tells you about. When the regulating stops, the whole thing starts moving toward matching the room. I've been calling that an entropy bubble, which is my phrase and not a textbook term.
A man like me will turn that into a whip, so here is the guard. This is upkeep, not effort. A sleeping body is still maintaining itself; some demands drop or change while the regulating and repairing carry on. Rest lives inside the work. That's the Grey Zone as far as I can tell, and it was never the dead center of anything. I wrote the long version of that once, in The middle.
My body carries plenty of the past: conditioning, old injuries, whatever my nervous system decided was dangerous years ago. But it can only report it now. Same with the remembering and the dread about the next regular day. There is no other hour available.
Which is how an enormous conversation about arriving came down to a bottle of kombucha. It's happened every single time. I drink one, my stomach settles, and my head clears out. I do not know the mechanism, and I am not going to invent one. I only know that when my stomach gets quieter, my mind seems to have more room. The body changes what the present moment feels like while I am standing in it.
What if reality keeps rhyming with itself? Rhyming rather than repeating, so that two things in completely different rooms make the same shape without either one proving the other.
A circle is already whole. Nothing is missing from it, and nothing about it is pending. The number that relates the circumference of a circle to its diameter is pi, an ordinary finite number, approximately 3.14159. Write that out in decimals, and you never get to the end of it. So, the shape is complete, and writing it down never gets there. Pi does not approach infinity, but the number of digits you can calculate approaches infinity because its decimal expansion never terminates.
A circle does not become anything. It can be complete without any changes. A body cannot. The body is whole while it is still repairing, replacing, adjusting, remembering, responding, and moving through time. Its wholeness does not depend on reaching a final version of itself. Being complete enough to exist right now does not mean there is nowhere left to go. The becoming is the body's, and the body is already doing it. Whole does not mean finished.
I have already arrived exactly where I belong, and I am still arriving.
No ask attached to any of this. The jar is there if you want it.
None of that makes anything nice, and this is where the disappointing part comes back around. The goal is peace. Joy and pleasure are never the goal, and they were never going to hold still, which is why handouts of pleasure and pain are normal parts of life, and they are relative to one another: the light and the dark, the positive and the negative. One thing is worth more relative to what it’s compared to. One person’s pleasure may be another’s pain. Beyond all of this and just below the static of life, peace already exists; we just have to return to it.
The peace underneath the static still leaves the whole room there. Numbness takes pieces out of it, and avoidance can do the same. I know that trick well. Resignation is harder to catch because a person can see the situation perfectly clearly and still give up the ability to answer it. Peace, as I mean it here, leaves both contact and response intact. What hurts can still hurt, and I can still move: say no, fix it, stay.
The one I still cannot separate cleanly from peace is endurance. In the middle of a stressful day at work, pushing through and actually being grounded can feel almost identical. I usually only know later, by what it cost me. If I come out of it drained and brittle, maybe I was only enduring. If I stayed present without shutting down or collapsing, maybe that was closer to peace. I do not have a perfect test for it. That stays grey.
And even peace can become an ego trap if I turn it into another rank to reach, another way to imagine I have moved above where I was before. Contradiction is not the problem. The world exists in contradictions, and two things that seem opposed can both be true at the same time. What I want is less ego taking up the room and more room for contradiction, other people, and the things I still do not know. The trap would be deciding that understanding any of this puts me above anyone else.
I suspect this small bounded temporary shape takes part in something that is not bounded, and I cannot prove a word of that.
It is Sunday, and nothing is finished. The glass is already full. The water keeps coming.
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