Late Night Journaling
4 min read by Dani 13 June 2021
It's 4:38am. A cool summer night. I'm on a trip to the beautiful mountains of Bulgaria. Feeling the cold breeze on the terrace of my hotel room while trying to gather my thoughts.
It’s beautiful - the clear night sky, the fresh mountain air coming swiftly through my nose all the way down to my lungs, energising my whole body.
But it’s cold… Who am I kidding; I’m shivering.
It’s a shivering beauty. Take it or leave it
Just taking one last peak at the sky. I want to absorb it all before I leave. Something about it has always fascinated me.
...
Back in my bed tucked in under the covers and ready to confront my mind. I want to dig into some thoughts and emotions that have been running through my mind recently. Ideas about a universal human condition. This is how my exploration begins:
We are individuals - indivisible, self-serving units.
And this is not necessarily a bad thing. For one, I believe that this truth can make us strong and can even drive us to cooperate more. We learn to live with others when we understand this fact about our nature. If each and every one of us is alone in some fundamental way then we owe each other understanding, compassion and cooperation. At the end of the day, aren't we all on the same boat? Paradoxically, by acknowledging the fact of our individuality, we are placed in a humanistic field that has a potential for great connection and sympathy.
This is what I have learned in the last year.
We are individual units who are fundamentally alone, but we need not be lonely.
We are grounded by this simple truth and by sharing it we can understand each other better.
Human suffering is also universal. Acknowledging it can be enough to spike empathy for fellow human beings, and gratitude for one’s own experience in this world. However, something I have missed in the past is the potential for human flourishing. I had only looked at the foundation of human suffering as a dead end. How escape it? Why escape it? Isn’t it all meaningless in the end?
What my naïve eyes had missed was the potential for good, for hope and eventually for prosperity. We have so many positive terms to describe well-being: happiness, meaning, joy, contentment, tranquillity . There doesn’t seem to be a universal feeling of happiness. Happiness, therefore, is a unique individual experience that fills us up, or you might say - makes us fulfilled.
I have come to appreciate all the ways in which one can be happy and to listen to and understand the struggles and hopes of the people around me. For each person walks a different path in life. To each individual I speak to, I have been strongly drawn to understand the path that has led them to this present moment. I have felt a surge of emotions to help people fulfil their potential- their capacity for happiness, productivity and fulfilment.
We can share experiences, we can help each other grow and we can comfort each other when the suffering becomes unbearable. For this lesson I am grateful. Even though it was painful to learn in the first place, I can feel the beauty underneath it all. Being vulnerable to each other, sharing our peaks and pains, building loving and trusting relationships… Truly connecting with others has been the most valuable experience in my life.