“Once I entered this world for the first time because I am a being who needs life in this world in order to acquire qualities I cannot acquire in any other world. And I must remain connected to this world until I have developed everything within me that can be found there. One day, because I have acquired all the faculties I need in this sense-perceptible, visible world, I shall become a useful coworker in another world.”

— Rudolf Steiner, in How to Know Higher Worlds

A quick pause on the flow of last years’ adventures posts.

Some of you might know that I write messages to my future self on my journal. This was the message I left to myself on the 31st of December 2019. It was written not long before, around the end of November, right after I finished reading Rudolf Steiner’s book How to Now Higher Worlds.

This quote speaks to me in many layers, the following is just one of them.

Looking back on the decade that just ended, one word comes to mind: erratic. Not in a bad way though. I broke up with a lot of concepts regarding romantic relationships and friendships, but mostly around work, career and lifestyle.

I left relationships that didn’t feel right, where I didn’t feel understood or cherished. I made an effort to stop caring for people whose behaviors showed how little I mattered to them, even though they had been playing significant roles in my life.

I went back and forth career wise, quitting conventional engineering jobs twice, embracing the freelance lifestyle as a chef, trying out different work setups, from seasonal jobs, to weekly gigs, from familiar environments to more structured ones. I felt like a baby again, picking up a different toy every couple of minutes, throwing it away, trying something new, going back to the one I had just threw away, only to start crying because nothing satisfied me in a deep, fulfilling way.

Nothing I did was strategic and linear, as opposed to almost everything I had done up until the end of the last decade, reinforced by an upbringing that valued predictability, consistency and rules above everything else.

So what exactly did I experience over the past years? Freedom. A lot of it. I indulged in freedom as a piglet in a puddle of mud. I allowed myself to be carefree, spontaneous and lost track of the amount of moments I realized “I can die now not regretting any actions I haven’t taken”. That does’t mean I did everything I wanted to do. It means that my behavior was one that didn’t allow settling for anything that I didn’t think was worth the commitment. It’s a tricky behavior I’m aware, the grass is always greener on the other side type of reasoning can easily take over.

Releasing yourself from the shackles of a life you were used to living has its joys and its pains. For me it has been a solitary path that I’ve been fearfully walking with a constant load of self doubt. So when I come across words like these ones from Rudolf Steiner I feel a hint of relief. It reminds me that the joys and the pains have a purpose, that life is just a part of an infinite journey, where what you experience and the characteristics you gain from those experiences is what really matters.