Hold Your Direction
Hold your Direction, Hold your Attention, staying steady, composed and trusting the practice of living truthfully.
Every weekday, my mother and I have coffee and tea hour. It is, on paper, the least productive hour of my day. It is also the one I would defend in court. I GET to have it because I am a freelancer now. My work comes in assigned contracts, spread across a few month windows, and between them there is a lot of open space. The old me would have looked at that space and panicked. She would have filled it with something, anything, just to feel like the clock was still running. And honestly, I understand her.
At fifteen I started my first job, and the American workplace engraved its lesson into my soul with a clock-in and a clock-out: time is money, and standing still is a waste. It took me a long time, and a few detours, to unlearn that and re-learn the richness of the art of working. The detours were good ones.
For six years I lived away from my family, though I visited often, I learned a great deal about life and about the means to survive it. I learned reading, loving, eating, flying, hiking, talking, earning money, earning a degree, finding hobbies, meditating and on the path I actually became a yoga teacher. I treated life like a syllabus and I was a very enthusiastic student. I also met some wrong people along the way. I say that with love, mostly. Some of them were lovely and simply not for me. Some borrowed my time and never gave it back. A few showed me, by example, exactly who I did not want to become. I would love to tell you I noticed right away. I did not. I stayed far longer than I should have, and I called it loyalty, or patience, or being easygoing. But every one of them was a teacher, and they all taught the same lesson: my time is worth holding on to, it is my most valuable asset. I only learned its value by watching where it leaked. Now I ask a few simple questions. Does this person make me kinder, more truthful, more compassionate? Do I leave the room with a little more peace than I walked in with? If yes, I make more space for them. If not, I let the friendship change shape, work to quietly and naturally come to an end or the effort to subside.
You become who you surround yourself with, and I know very few things that are truer than that. It is true no matter how carefully you split your hours between work and friends, it is true how fun and excited you feel around them, it is true how much you try to fool yourself that you actually need their friendship, their affection, their attention. How you spend your time, who or what you give your attention defines your life.
After those six lively years, I came back to the people who matter most to me, my brother and my mother. I gave up that burning fire, the unstoppable drive to become powerful, rich, authoritative and truly independent, because they needed me. Turns out, I was the one who needed them most. On that path, I found my way back to myself.
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Which brings me to what I actually want to say: trust the process.
I know how that sounds. It can land like a slogan on a coffee mug, so let me be clear that I mean it as a practice. Whatever you make time for yields fruit of its kind. Whomever you make space for, you learn from. However you position yourself to grow, you grow into that version of yourself. You have agency over your life, your thoughts, and your time. It is a force of nature.
For me, trusting the process looks like sitting still with a cup of coffee while my mother sips her tea, with no deadline in sight. It looks like I’m not filling my time in my google calendar. It means training my attention to stay put, so there is room for the people who come and go, for the opportunities that show up on their own schedule, and for lessons that only arrive in silence. I used to think that kind of stillness was the opposite of ambition. Now I think it is where ambition learns which way to face.
Where does my ambition now face? Inward. Use the precious time you have on this earth to truly get to know yourself. Where is your mind, where is your mind, WHERE IS YOUR MIND? I always scream to my students when I’m teaching a yoga class. Quite opposite of what a yoga teacher supposed to do I fathom. Truth to life, in my opinion, is knowing yourself.
“Man‘arafa nafsahu faqad ‘arafa Rabbahu.” — He who knows himself, knows his Lord.
Everything else follows from that like water running downstream. Who you spend your hours with, what work you say yes to, how you rest. How you produce, how you spend and how you live. You unlearn and re-learn to fill your soul, fill your mind, fill your body with all things good. You can only show up, practice, and trust that the process is doing its work. So anchor in your values, hold your attention and hold your direction. Embrace yourself in the true art of living. Tomorrow, there will be coffee and tea with my mother, and I will be there, all of me, in no hurry at all.
