connection trumps all

reconfiguring to the more important thing

exhausting week so far with my wife on 14-hour overnight shifts, which means being full house-husband, solo-parenting, and terrible sleep cause it’s hard to get used to sleeping without my partner!

i’ve been hating myself this week cause of going down marketplace rabbit holes for big purchases that have a significant daily effect on my life (changing my bike and stroller setups), which has meant way too much screentime for this sensitive one (my eye is twitching as i write this and the self-hate continues).

despite this, i try to focus on what energizes me, so after i setup the contractors for some house renovations, i went for a bike ride to my favourite park bench in the city.

my plan was to write what i’ve been seeing my coaching sessions and my time at TKS around good habits and why we don’t do what we so badly know we want to be doing (coming soon).

i knew that writing some ideas down analog-style would energize me, while sitting in the sun and the strees. so i wrote for about 20 minutes in my notebook before i noticed an old couple sit on the bench next to me. i’ve spent a lot of time “in the wild” around all sorts of people (just later today i helped someone on the street regain consciousness), so i feel like i’ve earned the ability to get a good read of people in the way they interact with the world.

these were good people. straight shooters, all about joie de vivre in the pure way, not the hedonistic way, like they clearly understood what is most important in life. probably helps that they were in their 70s to have such wisdom.

turns out he was algerian and she was russian. i did what i usually do with such people: i don’t care whatsoever about the content of what they’re saying, but rather the substance of their being.

let me explain. they were telling me all sorts of stuff about politics and how pakistan has nuclear power now? etc etc…all stuff i don’t know cause i intentionally live under a rock. i don’t care whether it’s true or not, for intents and purposes us chatting on our benches was just sounds coming out of our mouths as a vehicle to connect.

and connect we did. i eventually bought them a second round of coffee (the park bench is at the corner of a little neighbourhood cafe). hussain and natalia. we talked about how wise the sages in india are, and how wise the sufis are in the algerian sahara.

for the first time in a while, i didn’t feel bad about being productive. i initially had a goal: to write my ideas down. that didn’t happen, and it’s for a reason.

i got like halfway through my ideas before the more important thing popped up. i intentionally let it take up all the space because this is what i’m doing it all for. this genuine connection, this lost art of being able to just connect, not on the same ideology or hobbies or life stage…nothing. we had nothing in common, like truly nothing.

this is a skill i’ve been silently leaning into for the last decade with hundreds of stranger encounters that last over an hour. not because i think it’s productive, not because i think it’s the right thing to do or anything. it’s very self-motivated (as i think all things should be - this is what i consider pure motivation actually).

i do it because it’s the most alive i feel. the most “in the world” i feel, where life doesn’t feel like a simulation but feels like a fully immersive video game in the most real way and least synthetic way possible. i do it because it’s of the highest order, the metaphysical order, where nothing material is involved with the act of this type of connecting, and it’s just the energy radiating out of hussain’s eyes piercing into my soul when he tells me we’re really getting along.

i knew deep down that the higher purpose of what i set out to do with my bike ride getting me to this bench so i could write under the trees was not for the writing down ideas itself, it was for re-energizing my spirit and refilling my creative reservoir. and i knew myself enough to know that the real purpose is most accomplished by acknowledging the special human presence i could feel beyond my notebook.

i am currently reluctantly writing this 8 hours since this moment passed and this screentime is draining me. this is not what i expected to be writing today, i actually thought writing anything on substack was gonna have to happen next week when i’m more rested.

funny how the world conspires with us when we open ourselves up to its flow. lmk what this stirs in you once you’ve finished reading, i’d be curious to hear what this brings up for you.