Rock Bottom

Mental Skills

The problem with getting what you want is that it breeds an expectation into you. Privilege teaches you to expect privilege. It snuffs out the light in you.

Paradoxically, it makes happiness harder to find and the challenge harder to endure. When we finally realise that it is the road to the goal that holds beauty, not the goal itself, then we get closer to happiness and fulfilment.

Because the road never ends, and the teaching never stops! Once you can integrate that truth, we can begin to understand the wisdom in its teaching and the beauty in its path. Rock bottom is a far better teacher than privilege, luck and advantage could ever hope to be.

Because rock bottom allows you to meet with yourself, bare knuckled, bloodied, bruised and unattached. Down there, you find your life force as it actually is. It is a stark reminder that conditions have very little to do with life as it really is.

In my own life, I have never felt as alive as when I have had to scramble for survival at rock bottom. That path is not just an objective scramble, I am talking mentally, spiritually, subjectively and objectively.

I have learnt a very difficult lesson that I am so grateful for. Comfort and safety is a type of suffocation.

Obviously, this is not everyone's journey, but I suspect it is certainly mine. My own intuition lets me know that if I leave this path again to sit in relative comfort, my life force will start to stagnate and my light will go out.

So why leave this beautiful path? This path, where you can’t predict what is around the next corner.

Boy under a leaf blanket
Photo by Annie Spratt / Unsplash

Child-like curiosity is the energetic stamp that makes this pathway pop, to hell with leaving that to sit in a tower made of protection, apathy and boredom.

This idea that when everything falls into place, I will be happy. The path of struggle makes it crystal clear, nothing falls into place until you are happy with yourself, regardless of the conditions.

We have got it backwards. So, be careful of what you wish for.

We aren’t meant to freeze frame the picture and we aren’t meant to reach a summit. If you did, you would quickly realise that the beauty was in the climb up. The summit view is utterly empty without the journey.

This path is laid bare with growth and wisdom, as it’s meant to be natural and simplistic, there is no end point.

That’s the point!

Gilesy