In the Arena

I’ve been spending a lot of energy begging for everything to be perfect. Demanding, even.

It’s always been my favorite hobby, but recently I’ve caught myself indulging in it more often than normal, so the universe sent two of my favorite writers to set me straight.

Sasha fucked me up when he said:

This is the cessation of a certain mental function that most humans have by default: this constant looking away from what is towards some ideal, this constant imagining that our real lives are about to start, that we will escape this mess.

That was already powerful enough and stayed on my mind for a few days. Then to make sure I got the message, Isabel said:

What if we worshipped the present like we dream of the future and yearn for the past? Can we trade nostalgia for presence, desire for acceptance? Can we relate to where we already are, what we already have, as the end—just for a moment? What would it mean if we have already arrived? If we’ve been here the whole time, if what we have been searching for everywhere has always been contained in the Now?

I realized I don’t know what satisfaction feels like. It’s like I’m a kid watching a movie with my parents when a sex scene comes on: I close my eyes and pretend it’s not there.

I hit my quota at work? Now I have to hit it again next quarter, and then the quarter after that. I got booked for a DJ gig? Those sixty minutes aren’t enough, I need another one ASAP. I’m always on to the next thing.

This is less “I’ll be happy when” and more “life will start when.”

It’s as if I’ve spent an eternity sitting in the waiting room for life, hoping to hear my name called so I can finally exist.

I can’t count how many times I convinced myself that I wasn’t in the arena yet, but once a certain thing happened then I would be. Everything else was always the training ground, but the next big thing — a new job, new city, new situation — would be the real arena. I was sure of it. Everything I did was in service of my arrival.

And once I entered that new arena? It instantly became my baseline and all that mattered was the next one. Any feeling of satisfaction was drowned out by longing for more.

I’m experiencing it right now with an impending move to New York.

“Everything I’m doing right now is to prepare for New York. Before I go I need to fully recover from my surgery and get back in the gym. I need to improve my work situation. I need to finish more music. I need to level up this skill and that skill or I’m fucked.”

But what am I even preparing for? Am I actually fucked if I don’t progress enough between now and then? It’s not like the universe will rescind my move if I don’t check all the boxes. I don’t need every aspect of life to click all at once — life is happening right now. Every moment is the arena.

Knowing that intellectually is very different than internalizing it, though. I’ve always thrived under pressure or a tight deadline, so my subconscious creates a time-based sense of lack to push me to go harder.

It works really fucking well. But is sparking urgency at the expense of living life worth it when the side-effect is never feeling ready? One that prevents me from soaking up what I’m experiencing now?

Is there a situation where I’ll actually be ready? And even if I am ready, will I ever feel ready? If I hit some arbitrary measure of preparedness, I’d just move the goalposts and go back to that familiar yet uneasy feeling.

This is a far cry of who I used to be. I’d spend my days pleading with the universe to let me revisit the past and doing whatever it took to mentally time travel: listening to old music, visiting old places, re-reading old texts. The friction between where I was and where I wanted to be was all-consuming.

It’s not to say I don’t relive moments anymore — there’s a 100% chance that one day I’ll look back at these last few months in SF with a special type of fondness, the same flavor of nostalgia I feel when I look back on my last few months in San Diego before moving here — but living in the future still has the same impact: I’m asking to be somewhere that’s not here.

Eventually I’ll know what words came next in the story. I’ll want to tell the current me that I was ready. That I already had permission to live, if I simply let myself. That I should have spent more time existing and less time fantasizing. That while the arenas will grow bigger and the stakes will get higher, it doesn’t mean I should discount where I’m at now.

This is a plea to myself: Life has started. I’ve already arrived.