Learning the severity of my restlessness

when i am in the mountains

planting 3 more mango trees

I’ve been restless my whole life. When did it start? I’m not sure. It’s not like I was the type of person who was always doing something. The opposite. I was really lazy. I didn’t do much except for things I absolutely had to. I had no hobbies. I spent my whole life studying. Being in school was all I did. Outside of school, I never got into any extracurricular activities. I could never even muster up a gym habit. I watched TV a lot. I guess that started when I was a kid. I was an only child. Home alone most of the time when mom was at work. The TV and all 5 channels were my best friend.

When I moved to the states, watching SpongeBob and Disney became my excuse for learning English. On Saturdays and Sundays, I’d lay in bed watching TV all day. So I guess it started since I was young. My mind has been running with the programs.

Becoming aware of my restlessness

I wasn’t aware of my restlessness until I started meditating. I guess nobody is ever aware of their restlessness until something dramatic happens. Nobody in my life. Especially if it’s not the kind that makes you get up and do a hundred things at once. It’s so easy to disguise with a phone. There’s always a reason to be on your phone. A million things fit into that pocket square.

I started meditating when I quit my job. I knew it was something I needed to do when I watched a documentary about a monk. He was hooked on some kind of brain scan, and it showed that it was able to light up different regions of his brain corresponding to different emotions by just thinking about them. That was how effectively he could control his emotions. I wanted to control my emotions because I was a very angry person. My anger overtook me in ways that terrified me. That’s a story for another day.

When I started meditating, I realized my mind was restless even when my body wasn’t moving. First, it was really hard for me to sit. All kinds of things would come up, telling me to get out of my position— an idea to write down, something I forgot to do, my legs cramping, random itches. And even when I could force myself to sit, my mind was running like a horse on cocaine. It was the first time I realized: restlessness is not something physical. It starts in the mind and manifests through the body.

It took me at least 2 years of meditating on and off to start being able to observe my thoughts and not get taken away by them. My mind was like an air balloon without anchor, eagerly getting swept off in whichever direction the wind blows.

If you want to diagnose your own restlessness, go a day without your phone. Pay attention to how often you look for something to do or to eat. How hard it is to be still.

A new home for restlessness

When I quit my job and started running out of money, I had to change my lifestyle. I couldn’t stay living passively anymore.I had to change. I wanted to become an entrepreneur with a successful business. So I adopted Alex Homozi’s and David Goggin’s mindset. The first thing you should do when you wake up is look at your spreadsheet. Make your body work until it cries. Now my restlessness had a place to go. It channeled into building a business, and it felt great. I went hard for 12 months and burnt tf out.

Then I visited Plum Village monastery for the first time, and realized this wasn’t the lifestyle I wanted to live. If I continued down this path, I was going to be stuck in another rat race. I will never learn how to live a meaningful life until my midlife crisis (hopefully). I read TNH’s The Art of Power, and it became clear what I wanted. I didn’t want a successful business. I wanted something deeper. I wanted real power— the power to be free from my mind.

Restless Resurrection

So once again, I came back and faced my restlessness. I kept telling myself it’s really bad now because I was living in the city. At this point, I started nurturing the dream of moving into the mountains. Writing from the mountains. Growing food forests in the mountains. Holding space for people who need an escape in the mountains. So I knew I was restless. But I said, let me restlessly achieve one more thing. Then I can relax.

But today, I am in the mountains. I’ve been here for almost a month. And my restlessness didn’t go away. It has gotten even more intense. I am just as addicted to my phone as I’ve been. The busy energy is even more consuming now because there is so much I want to do on the land. So much I want to grow and to build. Every day, I wake up thinking about how many things I need to get done today. Even when I’ve implemented meditation and yoga, they are still just something to cross off my list. I have to get it done to get the next thing done. I don’t feel I have a moment to sit down. I have not once been able to tell myself, there is nothing to do today.

This is not the way I want to live. I thought that the stability of the mountains and the tranquility of the trees would calm my restless mind. They help me become more aware. But as long as I have a phone that’s connected to the internet, nothing has really changed.

This is the first time I’ve really faced the severity of my restlessness. I can’t believe it’s this bad. Here I am in the most secluded, calming place I could think of, and my nervous system still doesn’t know how to relax.

I guess it makes sense. My mom has never been able to relax. She’s a single mom living in a third-world country. Relaxing probably felt like a stab to her survivability. And so, even though I have no kids, I carry the energy of my single mom. The responsibility just displaces itself somewhere else.

It turns out this restless energy is not something that will go away the day you reach a goal or a destination you’ve set out to achieve. It continues to run within you. It changes its shape, its reason, its disguise. But it lives on as a part of you.

It’s not that I want to do nothing all day. I just want to be able to move from a place of excitement rather than need. I want to do something because I’m excited to do it. Not because my mind tells me I have to. It costs a lot of energy to think all day. I want to save that energy for something more meaningful. I want to end my day feeling nourished, not exhausted.

When I write from that place, my writing is better. When I cook from that place, my food tastes better. I am aware of the energy that goes into my creations. And I don’t want to share my restlessness with you. I want to share peace, love, and joy. And I’m tired of only feeling them in glimpses because my mind keeps taking them away from me.

To be very honest, I’m really tired of being a slave to my mind.

Now that I know how badly I’ve got this case of restlessness, I’m going to try a lot harder to be mindful. I’m going to come back to my breath more often. Pause more often. Take my mornings slow. Go on long walks without my phone. Remind myself that I am enough. Count my blessings at the end of each day.

I know most people don’t get a chance to live this way. To even come to this realization about their restlessness. So I hope through my life, you can see there is no destination where everything just works out. Here is all we have. And here is where we face things our parents hadn’t gotten a chance to.

Anyways, I’m going deep in the forest to camp this weekend. I’m going to use this as a reset. I hope the next letter you see from me will bring more stillness.

Until then,

🥭

p/s what topic would you like to hear from me next?