Why Becoming More Alive May Matter More Than Becoming More Accomplished.
When I reflect on my early twenties, I notice a beautiful pattern.
Opportunity seemed to find me in the most unexpected places.
I modelled for magazines and television advertisements.
I landed a leading role in a dance and drama production at a prestigious dance school.
I created, directed, and produced my own television show.
I worked with a former president.
I built a brand from my bedroom.
Looking back, what fascinates me isn’t simply what happened.
It is how I was living when it happened.
There was an ease to it.
A spontaneity.
A beauty.
A certain nonchalance.
Long before I knew words like optimization, productivity, personal branding, or instant gratification, there was another place I spent a great deal of time:
wandering.
If you asked my closest friends what I was like during those years, they might have described me as:
Often mind-wandering.
Maximum playfulness.
Extremely unbothered.
Elegant nonchalance.
And they would have been right.
I didn’t have elaborate goals.
I didn’t have a carefully engineered five-year plan.
My primary orientation was much simpler:
I was interested in what was happening now.
I lived in the moment.
And perhaps, without knowing it, that became my life’s signature.
Before I Could Understand Beauty, My Body Knew It
To understand where this way of being came from, I have to return to childhood.
I grew up surrounded by sensory rituals.
Ancient chants moving through the house.
The fragrance of incense.
Fresh hibiscus gathered and placed in sacred corners.
The sounds and aromas of freshly prepared food.
I didn’t understand the philosophy behind any of it.
I didn’t need to.
My body was learning something before my mind had language for it.
It was learning rhythm.
Beauty.
Ritual.
Sensation.
Repetition.
Presence.
These experiences became familiar.
And perhaps this is one of the most overlooked ways we become who we are:
The body learns through experience long before the mind learns through explanation.
I began to associate life with a certain atmosphere.
An atmosphere that felt beautiful.
Sensuous.
Playful.
Sacred.
Alive.
And over time, this atmosphere became part of how I moved through the world.
Beauty was not something I consumed. It was something that organized my attention.
I began to experience life through my senses.
I tasted the moment.
I allowed life to touch me.
I smelled possibilities.
I listened for what had not yet been understood.
I looked beyond what was immediately visible.
This wasn’t fantasy.
It was another way of paying attention.
A way of allowing perception to become more intimate than analysis.
I wasn’t always asking:
What should I do?
I was also sensing:
What feels alive?
What draws me closer?
What wants my attention?
What is this moment inviting me to notice?
And perhaps this is where creativity begins.
Not with the demand to produce something.
But with the willingness to be moved by something.
These feelings shaped how I participated in life—and that participation changed what I noticed, what I pursued, what I created, and what became possible.
Satyam Shivam Sundaram
There is a Sanskrit phrase from my childhood that I remember hearing in the chants:
Satyam Shivam Sundaram.
It is often rendered through ideas of truth, auspiciousness or the divine, and beauty.
But for me, these words have become a personal orientation:
Truth. Consciousness. Beauty.
They describe the way I want to meet existence.
To be truthful enough to recognize what is here.
Conscious enough to participate in it.
And receptive enough to perceive its beauty.
Perhaps this is what I was practicing as a child without knowing it.
Perhaps it is what I was practicing in my twenties when I wandered, played, noticed, and remained unbothered enough to let life surprise me.
And perhaps it is what I am returning to now.
Not a strategy for becoming my highest self.
But a way of becoming intimate with the self that is already here.
Because perhaps our highest potential isn’t something waiting for us in the future.
Perhaps it becomes visible when we are present enough to live what is already true.
And this is the pleasurable pathway:
Be here.
Let yourself be moved.
Receive what is beautiful.
Follow what feels alive.
Allow awareness to become embodied.
And let creation emerge from there.
I no longer think my most creative years happened because I knew exactly where I was going.
Perhaps they happened because I was deeply available to where I already was.
I was falling in love with now.
And perhaps that is where the highest self has been waiting all along.
