Getting Comfortable with the New
No Change Without Community
Dear Friend
The odd thing about writing to you like this in a public way is that I’m thinking of multiple people as I write. Any time I’ve written in the past, it’s been in the most intimate privacy of our friendship.
It’s in friendship that we shine. You falling off railway stations. When your Dad died and none of us knew what to say or do. It’s the music that we’ve made or listened to. Times where we danced and danced. Falling asleep silently laughing in delight at knowing you. How good it feels to be in this world when there are people like you in it.
I was having a pub dinner in London this week with Liviu when he said something profound. You get a lot of profound thinking with Liviu. He said:
No change without community.
So there is a shift going on inside my mind realising I’m writing to and perhaps for a community of friends. Like all shifts in awareness it takes a moment to adjust, to become comfortable with the new.
My false self would like me to censor myself on a public platform. That’s another way of the false self pulling the strings. The tail wagging the dog. My false self is also sending me electro shocks through my nervous system, drawing my attention to a childhood memory. A birthday party held for me at home in Workington. Hosted by my mother. I recall hating the idea of a party in my honour and disliking the experience even more.
The other kids ate all the food I wanted for myself, they played with and broke at least one of my toys and gave me a load of stuff I didn’t care about.
I wasn’t interested in them. I was obsessed with myself.
If this gets shared outside of friends I know it will reach friends I don’t yet know. My false self doesn’t like. Well never mind. Showing up can feel risky and happened when I was a kid, when I had the coping strategies of a kid - not relevant anymore.
Anyone can read this. The point of writing a blog about peace and healing is to talk about peace.
Not just talk about it.
For us to experience peace.
The time for peace is always now.
There is no future peace.
What happens when we think of the present and future as interchangeable terms?
Now is real.
Future is an idea.
Ideas of peace we share now become the future.
But it’s always now.
Things are happening now that can’t be ignored or written off as happening in some distant corner of the earth.
We’re realising that the whole of humanity and the world are all connected in one indivisible whole.
Who needs to see a fresh pile of dead bodies to know that now is the time for peace?
How do we achieve peace in our generation?
We find peace with ourselves.
We find it within. In friendship with you I find myself.
It’s not that the false self doesn’t show up. It’s increasingly clear that this Substack is my way of summoning the false self for an thorough but compassionate examination.
Internal changes come first, it’s happening now. One of the things I love about you is you see me. Friendship has always been healing.
Anyway.
I’ll be doing this every day for the rest of the year.
I’m still missing the feel of paper and pen though.
And the envelopes.
But not the stamps and letterbox.
I’d often carry letters around in my coat pocket for days. They’d get rumpled and smudged by the rain. Sometimes I’d chicken out from sending them. I have those letters in a trunk at home.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey