What are you seeking? Most everyone is looking for something: more material stuff, better health or improved looks, a way to get ahead (legally or not), happiness and peace (however you define it), revenge, the fountain of youth, a way to be okay, a way to escape the pains of life, a more humane world, or perhaps, enlightenment. The list is as varied as the 8.3 billion people inhabiting the planet.

For me, it used to be truth, whatever it was, at any cost. I didn’t care what I found as long as it was The Truth, big ultimate, bell-ringing, undeniable truth. I just knew it was out there somewhere, and I was not going to be stopped from finding it, not by teachers who didn’t seem to have a clue, not by a husband or son who needed me more than they thought I needed to be me, not by society’s roles and rigor, and not, God-damn it, by myself being conned, quitting, giving up or forgetting.

I was so very arrogant. I thought I could find the Holy Grail, that there was one to be found and even though the best minds and hearts in the world had failed, I wouldn’t. I say failed because no one had found an answer that satisfied me, that I could definitively point to as yes, this! Naturally, I am the final judge of that, just like you are for what you want to find, to get, or to be.

When the heavens broke open and the light of understanding dropped on my head like a boulder in a mud slide, and about as capriciously, I couldn’t do anything but laugh. It wasn’t exactly funny. It was nothing I could have anticipated and unfortunately for the one who wanted something special to share, was nothing that I could ever impart.

It was not the end of me as some say. I still am a character in the play, an expert at the role called ‘me’, but it was the end of the role called ‘seeker’, the end of investment in a bit part whose purpose was finding truth.

In case you’re laughing at ‘bit part’, I see them all as bit parts, or on the other end of the spectrum, the only role that really matters, often both at the same time.

The mystics over the ages hadn’t failed, I was just not capable of seeing what they could only point to. There is a reason no explanation was any good, why no one could give me what I hadn’t discovered on my own.

As long as I am playing the game of duality, of separation, I am singular, and I seek, knowingly or not. In separation, I am literally on my own here. If I am not playing that game anymore, if I am not invested in the world of separation, the seeker aspect has to fall apart–quickly or slowly–which doesn’t really matter to anyone but the one, the seeker, who is already melting like the wicked witch in Oz.

When work needs to be done, when I think I am not there yet, that I still need to find anything, even something like truth, I have locked myself into a gibbet of being singular and there is no someone(s) other than haunting ideas. There is no one to do the work for me, no savior who will take up his cross and be crucified for me, there is nothing I can find outside of the story of want and need and lack.

The recognition, the realization of what’s here is not even an inside job. No one, not even me, not you either, can make it happen. No one can speed it up. No one can do or not do anything to prevent it from unfolding when and as it will. What a perfect description of one of the ways, ‘Thy will be done,’ is intended.

I look back at the teachers whose feet I sat at, the shelves of books I inhaled, the weeks of intensives, the hours of meditation, and it is easy to discount them, to say they were missteps. The spiritual highs, the expansive insights were always short-lived, offering no true answer. The teachers must have been delusional and blind. If they hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have reappeared as a pain-filled human, hours, days or months later, or would I?

But, and this is a big but … can’t you see how they were building the capacity to perceive the mystery, to see what is always right here in plain sight and absolutely overlooked? The apparent missteps were the winds that cleared the cobwebs encrusting my eyes, the fires breaking the chains around my heart, the waves of persistence that stripped away cherished and ever so fallacious programming about what it means to be truly human. They were the earthquakes that broke open belief systems handed down through the ages.

They were never a waste. They were of infinite value. Each human breath is precious regardless of how painful or how much we argue about or question its worth.

What did I realize? I could tell you, but you wouldn’t believe me. It’s too insane and to grok it, you’d have to be a fool. If you know, you know, and don’t really know anything at all.

So why I am I telling you this story? I just wanted you to know that you’re perfect exactly as you are, regardless of how your life appears to be playing out, regardless of fulfilled and unfulfilled boxes on your checklist. Your life might not be perfect in the way you’d like it to be, in the ‘what you want’ category, but it is perfect on levels that defy understanding, so you do you (as if you could stop) and remember you’re the subject matter expert. You can’t do you wrong.