Castles of Worry

We all need a little more gentleness with each other. We need to be a little more gentle with our parents. Definitely more gentle with our friends (especially the ADHD ones), and even some more with our colleagues.

To random strangers we don’t even know (yet), some gentleness is the absolute minimum as a show of honor.

Most importantly, we need gentleness with ourselves.

I love how when I am on psychedelics, my natural state of being develops a gentleness—even though it doesn’t feel like I’m putting any extra effort to be more natural, it intuitively feels natural—as if it’s something my body has known for a lifetime.

The gentleness of slow eating. The gentleness of slow moving. The gentleness of slow seeing. The gentleness of slow touching. This is why gentleness is important because it simples things down, and simplicity allows you to see things that otherwise get lost in the noise.

Take music for example, if I suddenly start playing a complex symphony of instruments and melodies, with atmospheric sounds and vocals and the whole thing, you won’t follow it, or enjoy it. It’s all too much and we get tired or distracted and it’s exhausting. Instead, if I start with a gentle drum loop, slowly layer in some cymbals, then maybe some synth and one by one, build up, gently, to a mix of intricately linked sounds, you’ll be following the progression, we’ll be invested into the build up, we’ll be focused and more present.

So, I think this is a good analogy about most other things in life that often get lost in the noise of everyday routine.

“Is this what I want to do?”

“Do I feel this way?”

“What do I think about this?”

The way that the world is currently designed is to constantly ask more of you, such that, we lose ourselves in the endless shuffle.

When things feel as if they’re dialing up, and when I start to worry about entirely fictional constructions of “castles of worry,” sometimes I just need to pull the rug and stop everything in its tracks so I can look at what’s in front of me with gentleness. I often find when I am doing that, the founding stone of my castle was not real in the first place, though I allowed myself to go on an exhausting mental trip anyway. Well guess what, I didn’t even earn any airline miles for it.

But this is the core problem: a lot of us know anything but castles of worry.

Some of us (myself included) have lived an entire lifetime in the fictional construction of someone else’s model of life. For example, when I look at my life with gentleness, it allows me to see that much of my own life, including my sense of perception, and understanding about my outer world is simply based on a borrowed construction of someone else’s (in most cases, people I don’t even know). Yet, for some reason I found myself fully committed to embrace these constructions, in fact making choices (even hard ones) to pursue them even further. Things like what I eat and what really makes my body feel good, or what I do for my job or as a profession and if that’s how I really want to contribute to this world.

Imagine living and organizing your life around a castle of worry that wasn’t even yours.

The world as it is, is designed to turn up the volume on all things—professional and personal—to let us stay within the closed walls of these castles of worry.

Gentleness allows us to bring those walls down and expose the weak foundation.

And guess what happens after the walls are down and the foundation is exposed? It takes more gentleness to rebuild.

Use gentleness to arrive at gentleness.