On action, agency & delulu

I remember sitting at a ramen place with my brother last year when he caught me in an anxious loop. He tapped my shoulder. "Bhaiya, you don't have to suffer alone."

The words jolted me. After a few minutes, I responded: "I could just vomit everything in my mind, but then there will be two people with the same thoughts. What's the point of that?"

He said something I wasn't expecting.

"The point has nothing to do with the feelings. The point is to take a step."

I couldn't understand it then. But something made sense. Instead of sitting with all the feelings and doing nothing to change them, what if I just took an action, whatever that action may be? What would happen then?

That's when it hit me.

If I'm just a character in a story at any given time, shouldn't my role be to experience life in a way that keeps the story moving forward?

The goal of my character, with whatever role I may be playing or experience I'm having, is to take an action so the story continues. The last year, since that conversation with him, shifted something in me that I didn't see coming.

The idea of agency became clearer than ever before. Action leads to your ability to move the story forward, which fuels you with the confidence to take more actions, and over time, you train yourself to become a high agency person.

But let's say I become this high agency person. What next? To be high agency and then not see things go forward the way I want them to is its own painful journey. I started noticing that I was becoming stuck again. So I went back to the character idea. Is the character playing a role so he can live a deterministic outcome towards the end of the story? For me personally, that's a terrible way to live. If everything I wanted to happen actually happened all the time, I would be miserable. I love the life I live because there is so much that happens in it that my brain could never imagine.

This is something I have been sitting with. After a year of constantly noticing how much life happens outside of my control, and on top of that, how much life happens outside of my imagination, it changed something within my mind again. I noticed that my mind had proven one thing consistently.

It was never in fact right with all the possibilities it creates. It could never imagine the best things that have come to happen in my life.

It could just never, ever do that. On top of that, all the worst things it ever imagined, they never happened. So in this spectrum of can never think of the best case scenarios and it's terrible at accurately predicting the worst case scenarios, I'm starting to take a step back and first, stop listening to all the stories that my mind tells me. It is just bleh. I notice a story, and I'm learning not to play it. I can refer to all the tapes and I can choose to play it.

But then I had to figure out what do I do with the dripping pressure of high agency and not getting what I want in life, or not getting the outcomes I would like to see. Only to realize again that the story will continue, my goal is for the story to continue moving forward. And with that, also to notice that my job, really, with all this agency, is to give things in front of me a fighting chance.

The story will do what it does. Hearts will break, careers will change, someday my heart or brain may decide to call it. But till that time comes, there is so much I can do in front of me to give things a fighting chance and perhaps that is all I am going to do and perhaps that is all I am also supposed to do.

Action -> Agency -> Giving something a fighting chance

Sounds about right, and sounds very doable.

But there is also something else beyond this. There is this unique ability for me, the ability I hold right in front of me to approach life in a certain way too. You see. Everything outside is driven by this narrative, a core programming so to speak, that guides where I go, how I choose to action, do I choose scarcity in everything I do, do I assume that the world is there to get me, or do I lean onto delusion belief in the magic life has to offer, whatever it may give with that magic.

And so, I'm starting to choose to operate from a place of delulu :)

Who knows what the world brings to us, what may happen to everything around us, whether things will work out, whether I will find the kind of people, community, love, hope that I want to live with, but I am working with my mind to choose to live it from a point of delulu.

Delulu belief that powers Action -> Agency -> Giving something a fighting chance -> fuels delulu belief.

A delulu belief in the magic of the universe, and for the love of living this life so I can see what is written for me, this character, in this story, or series of them, that exist in front of me, and in fact, how my true commitment is towards the love of seeing the story to move forward, till my time comes.

Love,

Rishi