Becoming The Wind
Reading time: 4 minutes
Themes: Fear, self-discovery, transformation
Take a second and ponder a dream you’ve had at some point in your life. Have you ever felt the peculiar sensation of standing at the threshold of a dream, understanding that crossing this threshold requires one single step of action, yet feeling utterly immobilized by the thought of doing so? In these moments, fear has a way of barging in and breaking the rhythm of our once-bold strides, leaving only hesitation in it’s wake. Alongside fear and hesitation, hopelessness rides shotgun—whispering that our goals are unattainable, our visions of a brighter future merely a fantasy. Unfortunately, we often prove the ego right by allowing it’s tyrannical shouts, responsible for all the commotion, to drown out the roaring fire in our souls. Eventually, when enough water has been thrown, we will find it harder and harder to warm ourselves beside the embers, and find ourselves in acceptance of cold, stagnant comfort.
A little over a year ago, I found myself in a Costa Rican condo utterly engulfed in fear. I felt like a foreigner in adverserial territory—all ultimately a figment of my own internal state but no less real in its manifestation. After three, long days of isolation and procrastination, I put my ego down for a moment and ventured out in search of something better. I would walk along the beach and as each wave ran between my feet, I felt it carry away pieces of my old self-assurance with it. Every step through the dense jungle interrogated my resolve, weakening my once-firm grip on my life direction and identity. The man I had known myself to be up until this point told me to resist. “You can’t start over now, there’s not enough time!” it pleaded. All the while, the man I was being called to be confidently stood before me offering an alternative. It’s true that ahead lay many trials, allies, enemies, and life-altering crises—and the fear was visceral—but in a moment of clarity I realized that nothing scared me more than the thought of forfeiting my potential.
Rising to meet a call to action inevitably pushes us across a line with no option of return. Though we may return to the same plot of dirt to the same familiar faces, neither ourselves nor those familiar sights will every be the same as when we left them. Almost a year later, having returned from my travels to face a host of new trials, I came face to face with a sort of ‘death’. I was markedly sure that every bit of what I refer to as ‘shedding skin’ had already occurred in the many trials along my South American journey—that was until a seemingly benign moment at my computer when I accidentally erased my hard drive. On that hard drive not only lay hundreds of hours of work, but yet another crumbling of the new path which I had put all my chips on all those months prior. With a single button push, I found myself right back in the familiar grief that comes when an old identity, a deeply ingrained part of who we think we are, once again died.
Grief speaks many languages, but common among them all is an inward focus. When we lose a loved one, a relationship, a place, or many months' worth of work, we are grieving for our loss. We grieve the loss of over the direction we anticipated—the way we saw things working out that suddenly no longer have potential. For months before the incident, I would walk and pray each morning about my life’s direction. All along, I felt a nudge to pursue something bigger than the films and petty projects I’d been working on—something new that I was uniquely poised to offer—but I chose to resist. I chose to remain on the path of least resistance, even though it left no room to wander off. Any time I would entertain new ideas, I’d feel the immediate friction of the ego mocking me with a lack of confidence in my ability to forge my own way and ultimately convincing me to remain in the lifeless resistance.
There is a scene in one of my favorite books, ‘The Alchemist’, where the main protagonist, Santiago, finds himself in an identical position though with different circumstances. Santiago has reluctantly left his comfortable life as a shepherd to pursue his Personal Legend. In doing so, he’s found love but has been forced to leave it behind for a time, been robbed and deceived by supposed friends, and found himself pursuing certain paths that ultimately left him confused and lost. After wandering through the desert, he stumbles into the wrong company and ultimately is forced to do the impossible: Santiago must turn himself into the wind in a final test of strength or face death at the hands of the chief. In a moment of desperation, he calls out to every force outside of himself that he can possibly muster including the Sun and even the Wind itself but neither of them can help Santiago with his need. After exhausting all his options, and just as things seem pretty hopeless, Santiago realizes he must change everything about how he thinks if he is to do the impossible. In a moment of crying out to God, he realizes that the power was inside him all along—all he needed was to submit.
It took me several weeks, wrestling with both God and my ego, to grapple with the reality of my loss and the denial that accompanied it before I could reach the same epiphany as Santiago atop that mountain. I had embraced the call, crossed the threshold, been tested among foes, and emerged victorious, yet in one defining moment, everything had disintegrated into ashes. As I lay amidst the remnants of a former self that was beyond resurrection, I experienced a peculiar, surreal peace that I imagine Santiago must have also. It was as if, even amid pain and chaos, I was precisely where I needed to be. Only in the submission could I triumph over the demise of my past self, rise from the ruins, set my sights on new horizons, and stride forward on a path uniquely mine. Like Santiago, I realized the power had always resided within me—the power to release what has passed away, adapt, and rise anew. This revelation, this ability to transform and reinvent oneself, is the truly the most valuable treasure there is.
