Introducing... The Perfect Essay!! 🎉🎉🎉
(or, how to enjoy being ordinary & being you)
I woke early, the first day of 2024, thinking: today is the day that I will write you the perfect essay.
It will demonstrate my dazzling brilliance as a wordsmith. It will bring incisive wisdom and scoops of healing balm to whoever needs it. It will (as a happy by-product) go viral and bring me thirty thousand new subscribers and fountains of praise and enough money to put down a deposit on a cute cottage in the country.
“Wow! Mmm! Oh, I’ll never forget that sentence. Did you see what she did there? Oof! Who IS this woman???”
During my morning meditation, mid-brain scramble as I plotted what I was going to write, I suddenly remembered that I was meant to be starting my anti-New Year’s Resolution. Five minutes of each day of January, imagining that I am loveable just as I am.
Everything stopped. Knowing that I was already enough whooshed through me. Tears sprung to my eyes. It was almost too much to bear. The knowing skittered away again, leaving me with the echo of a smile.
I do know that I don’t have to write you the perfect essay in order to be loved, or to prove to myself that I’m worthy. I forget. I know that what the world actually wants from me is that I just be Satya. Limited, fallible, flawed. Prone to delusions of grandeur and sucking greed. Skilled at giving Dharma talks and stroking the bellies of happy dogs. Sometimes infuriating, sometimes shining with genius, and for the vast majority of the time (like all of us) averagely ordinary.
This year I’m going to get on board with enjoying being ordinary. I’m going to enjoy writing the ordinary sort of essays that Satya writes, like this one. I’m going to be more realistic with my expectations of myself and of others. I’m going to make myself a channel, as much as I can - receiving blessings, filtering them through my Satya-ness, and offering them out.
I finished my meditation and walked into town for the second, public part of my daily prayers to the Earth. A couple of people had promised to join me but they didn’t come and so I was blissfully alone. It was cold out, and quiet. In between car-whooshes I could hear nearby water burbling, and a sprinkle of birdsong.
I had left the book I usually take to town in my office where my mum was sleeping, and so I took the book I’d just used during my online meditation instead. This poem (I promise I am not making this bit up) was next:
Honesty and truth. Unremembered quiet words. Unnoticed acts.
The sky was so blue. I sat on the cold steps and watched the clouds - so bright! So various! So themselves! - and my eyes filled with tears for the second time.
Happy New Year.
Satya <3
My Anti-New Year’s Resolution invitation starts today and the next essay, on why New Year’s Resolutions often fail, goes out tomorrow. If you would you like to receive the rest of the month’s essays but can’t afford the subscription right now do let me know (satya@satyarobyn.com) and I will gift it to you - it would be my pleasure.
"Five minutes of each day of January, imagining that I am loveable just as I am.
Everything stopped. Knowing that I was already enough whooshed through me. Tears sprung to my eyes. It was almost too much to bear. The knowing skittered away again, leaving me with the echo of a smile."
These words, your words, reading them aloud quietly to myself, enjoying them as I always do, until suddenly, literally, everything did stop, and I remembered how amazed I once was to discover that it was possible to hold myself tenderly in my own arms, one hand on my belly, the other on my heart, and how comforted and deeply loved I felt. The tears, the weeping followed on the dawning realisation that I was enough, that I had always been enough. I just didn't know it. Your Perfect Essay today is a beautiful reminder of the perfection to be found everywhere and here too, in the depths of our hearts.
(I always read everything aloud to myself these days. It is as if I cannot quite understand what they mean, each on to their own, before pulling the strands of their uniqueness together until I finally get how they are knitted together, how they hold the sense of themselves in unison with one another.
What a great start to the year! My daily mantra, at the end of meditation, finishes with "Find the courage to breathe in the suffering of the world; allow peace and healing to breathe out through you in return" 💕