I’m Tired of Running —Where I have been

Hi there! You probably don’t have the slightest idea who I am, but today I am going to write you a little story. If you are reading this, Welcome and Thanks, I hope you will find it interesting.

I am only 18 years old, but already so tired of running towards future hope that I cannot see. Even more tired am I of running away from things, problems, truths and situations I don’t agree with, so I stopped, and here I am ….

I often use the word running as a way to explain how I have been trying to get through life, fast, focused on progress and careless to what I am passing, but (luckily) I am not the kind of person to keep running through life without collapsing and giving up. I didn’t feel lucky when it first hit me, that I can say for sure, but if it hadn’t broken me the way it did, I would have never felt like life would be anything worth living.

Before I never felt true joy, it wasn’t necessary for producing. I felt strangely disassociated to myself and the world like I was floating a foot above my head with nothing to do and nothing to say. I didn’t enjoy people, even my closest of friends, because I wasn’t being human, I was just surviving another day.

“I wasn’t being human, I was just surviving another day…”

I can’t say for sure why I felt that way but I have spent my afternoons and evenings working on understanding the mind and psyche since I was only thirteen years old. Here I am almost six years later, so what now do I have to say?

I worried a lot, and the things I worried about, I also really cared about. Not a good combination! I worried that I wouldn’t be able to take care of myself and that my mind wouldn’t hold up for what it was needed for. I worried about the fights in my family and the decisions I had to make in school. I even worried about what I would be doing five years into the future, on this day, at this moment, would I be doing the same things I had been doing before?

It finally broke me, I gave up on figuring it out or solving it in any way, and only after that, I have been able to see that the thinking I was doing, was completely unnecessary and putting me in lots of pain. I was making one life (my dream/expected life) in my head that had nothing to do with what is getting done in the real world. So I stopped …

“Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” — Eckhart Tolle

I stopped believing my thoughts, they were being deceptive and dishonest, and I got rid of any expectation of what life in front of me would look like and started trusting it to be a crazy mess (the most beautiful and complex mess there is). I stopped being harsh on myself and take quick final decisions, and let the flow of life take over in moments where I would have earlier panicked.

I guess that back then I thought that life was more… final, then I do now. When panic came, I thought I’d die, when the family fought I expected them to break each other and when I couldn’t go to school, I could see my whole future falling apart. But all that was what it was because I expected it to be.

“We are at our most powerful the moment we no longer need to be powerful.” ― Eric Micha’el Leventhal

I have given life the trust I once had in myself, to give myself freedom, feelings, and understanding. I have let life make all those final decisions, while I just keep on doing what I can. I have put the universe in charge of what is and what is not, making sure my brain never thinks it knows something for sure because I wouldn’t want to give up my chance to know even more.

You could probably call this kind of “giving up” many things, but I love to call it surrendering to life itself. It is really understanding you are a tiny part of something so large and complex that we can only ever wonder about the truth. That the moment is a permanent thing (in the passing of life) and it is the way you do things that matter, not what you do.