Higher Is Closer Than You Think
Dear friend,
Marc asked me to make a wish. He’d brought a Sooty & Sweep–style magician’s wand and a wishing machine, in the form of a dandelion seed head preserved in a clear acetate block. We’re in a café just round the corner from Victoria Rail Station.
There’s Marc, over from Guernsey for a book launch, and Louise, Jason and Matt. Jason and Matt I’m meeting for the first time.
“What do you wish for?” he asked, watching the unease rise up in me as I lifted the plastic novelty wand in front of witnesses.
Something froze in my brain for a moment and I could not think of a single thing to wish for — a childlike fear of wanting something out loud. The body remembering the risk of being seen wishing.
“I wish to live in a world where people live from a higher place.”
I fudged it a little, adding, “on this planet or any other.” (What does that even mean?) The cosmos being all that ever was and is and will be — there are definitely other planets somewhere. You can’t rule out unknowns. But this is the only one we know, so the bit about another world is basically null.
And maybe that was me trying to escape the real wish.
This is no time for escape.
Escape, for me, would be drifting back into abstraction — imagining other worlds or other versions of myself where everything feels simpler. That’s the mind trying to outrun something that actually needs our presence.
It’s time to join one another in healing.
A higher place inside ourselves can be something incredibly ordinary. Not cosmic at all.
It can be the moment you realise you don’t need to win the argument.
It can be letting people off the tube before you push on.
Tiny recognitions of “oh… I don’t need to add more noise to my world.”
Whatever it is, we don’t need instruction manuals. We can be good to ourselves in hundreds of small ways, bit by bit, day by day — and follow a path that leads towards a world we actually want to live in. The kindness we seek is already inside us.
What we can find within us to give comes back multiplied. That’s why even our smallest efforts matter in the grand scheme of how messy things are. Each tiny act becomes part of a network effect.
I felt exposed but also good about it — sitting with the feeling, not running from it, as the energy shifted inside and around me.
Later, by the Thames with another friend, we lamented how you see people unable to listen to views that aren’t their own.
I’ve been that person. The one who can’t hear through their own noise. It’s uncomfortable to admit, but it’s part of the work.
It’s a problem when we’re unwilling to walk in someone else’s shoes for even a minute. But if someone can’t do it yet, that’s how it is. Maybe later they’ll start looking for that higher place in themselves.
It comes eventually.
To everyone.
I feel that as truth.
Now I’m home with some herbal tea, feeling sleepy in a good way. Ready for an early night.
And if the “higher place” comes to everyone eventually, then a kinder, more connected world is inevitable. We just can’t say how long the process will take.
But today — between the café, the Thames, the conversations, the awkward wand moment — I felt something clearer:
People want to rise.
They want connection.
They want gentleness.
Even the ones who can’t show it yet.
Good people are everywhere.
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey