At the deepest level of who you are…there is nothing to fix.
This is quite the eloquent telling of what I find to be a universal truth. š
Am not familiar with the writer - yet š
Thanks for the share Kathrin Marx
āLet me say this as plainly as I can.
At the deepest level of who you are, there is no frantic project of trying to fix your life. No endless chase for happiness. No constant negotiation with reality to make it finally work for you.
That whole drama, the striving, the searching, the needing it all to come together, thatās happening on the surface. Itās learned, conditioned, inherited. Underneath that, something far more unsettling is true: nothing is missing.
What you are at your core is not scrambling for peace, freedom, or contentment. It isnāt trying to secure them, improve them, or hold onto them. There is a basic, unagitated presence that doesnāt need to be completed. No fear to manage. No disturbance to resolve. Just a kind of quiet, unadvertised okayness that doesnāt depend on circumstances cooperating.
Call it God, call it ultimate reality, or drop the language entirely if itās loaded for you. The point isnāt the word. The point is that what those words are pointing to isnāt somewhere else. Itās not outside you, above you, or waiting for you at the end of some spiritual process. If you go looking for it out there, youāll miss it. If you turn toward what is most basic in your own experience, you run straight into it.
Hereās where most people get tripped up. Youāve been trained to think in terms of what you have. You have a job, a car, a phone, a belief system, a personality. So you assume peace works the same way, that itās something you can acquire, build, protect, or lose. That if you get your life arranged correctly, youāll finally secure it.
But peace is not something you have. Itās not an asset or a possession. Itās what you are before you start organizing your life around the assumption that something is wrong.
If that lands, even a little, it disrupts the entire game. Because if you are not fundamentally lacking, then the endless project of becoming okay starts to look less like a path and more like a distraction. The seeking, the fixing, the spiritual striving begin to reveal themselves as ways of avoiding something much simpler and more confronting.
Iām not saying your life suddenly becomes easy. It doesnāt. Pain still happens. Loss still happens. Circumstances still shift. But the assumption that something essential needs to be added to you in order for you to be whole, thatās the part that collapses. And once that collapses, you donāt need another teaching to complete you. You need the honesty to stop pretending youāre incomplete.ā
- Jim Palmer -
You can find him on substack.
[picture of Cody Johnson, one of the bottle babies from two years ago - being himself š]