Week four in the Ashram. Surrender is peaceful, but the silence is disturbed by my own whispers tickling my ears. ‘Talk to me’ it breathes. It feels like being held against a white wall with nothing but my own reflection to interrogate me.

My mind, once a megaphone, has softened to a radio signal tuned to natures frequency. I hear the trees, the birds, the insects. And then beneath all that, the old machinery of my thoughts warming up again. Questions. Always questions. A swarm I can’t swat.

Before anything else, I need to put this on paper: living this experience is already reaching the goal. Scratch that. Living this experience, already is. 

The chase I was trained for

There is no place the mind cannot go. My system keeps defaulting to the chase. I am trained to measure life by achievements: set target, sprint, collapse, repeat. It is a ridiculous design. One where satisfaction is always one checkpoint ahead, never here, never now.

I catch myself wanting breakthroughs, transformations, revelations, as if enlightenment were a trophy handed out at the finish line of a self-development marathon. It’s not.

The interrogation continues. One question keeps hitting its target: why do I daydream like it’s my primary job?

I understand the childhood version of this skill. When I was living an experience that I wanted to escape from but physically couldn’t, it was my exit to happiness. But here where there is nothing I want to escape from, why am I still writing scenes of a future life as if the present isn’t worthy of the final cut? 

I imagine beaches, continents, lovers, futures that glow with a suspicious level of perfection. And I know (intellectually) that sunbathing on the beach in Australia won’t make me happier than reading a book against a tree in the Ashram.

The persistent guest named Desire

The answer circles back to desire. Not the soft kind. The primal, insistent kind. Desire is a guest that drags its suitcase straight to the heart and refuses to check out. And I keep confusing its persistence for purpose.

I have been taught in the Ashram that desire creates freedom but attachment is the trap. Attachment shapes expectation. Expectation shapes disappointment. A simple rule easy to memorize, useless to embody.

So I attempt the best thing to do. Just be, and trust. But being is not passive, and trust is not neutral. They are muscles. Mine are out of shape.

So what’s the real question?

When I zoom out, the real question isn’t why do I daydream?
But why do I believe my happiness lives somewhere my body is not?

Again, ridiculous design.