Reality Is Flimsier Than You Think

There was a tree on my street I walked past every day.

Some mornings it was the most alive thing I had ever seen. Other mornings it looked dead to me. Grey. Lifeless. Like the world had quietly turned its back on me.

Same tree.

Nothing about it ever changed. The leaves were the leaves. The light was the light. What changed was the state I was in when I looked at it.

And when I really sat with that, it scared me. Because it meant the world I was seeing was not solid. It was flimsy. It was bending around whatever I happened to be carrying inside me that day.

A heavy mood, and everything looked like it was against me. A phone call from someone I love, and five minutes later the same street was beautiful again. The world had not moved an inch.

I had.

We like to believe we move through life seeing things as they are.

We don't.

We see them through whatever state is running underneath us. The same room, the same woman, the same problem, the same bank balance looks completely different depending on the weather moving through us in that moment. And most of us never notice the weather at all. We just believe what it shows us and call it reality.

This is the part that should stop a man before making his next judgment call.

Most of us are not living from purpose. We are living from state.

We make the decision. Send the message. Take the job. Start the fight. End the relationship. And we tell ourselves it was reason. It was clarity. It was strategy. It was discernment.

But if you slow down and look honestly, you find something humbling underneath. That you were moving according to your mood. Reacting to an internal weather you never even saw, let alone chose.

We are made of states. And those states are quietly enforcing our next action while we swear it was our own decision.

Here is where it gets harder, and more important.

Your body cannot always tell the difference between danger and growth.

They feel the same. Exactly the same. The racing heart. The mind flooding with thoughts. That voice going, no, go back, this is not safe.

For most of my life I believed that voice every single time. I thought it was my intuition protecting me. I thought it was wisdom.

It was not. A lot of the time it was just fear, wearing the mask of wisdom, dragging me back from the exact thing that would have cracked my life open.

I ran from some of the best things that ever happened to me. And I did not even know I was doing it. I thought I was being careful. I was being afraid.

I have come to see fear differently than I used to.

Fear is a gate. And standing in front of that gate is a guardian.

Behind him is everything you actually want. Your expansion. Your freedom. The next, larger version of your life. And the guardian's entire job is to make sure you do not get there easily. He shows up as the pounding chest, the spiral of thought, the certainty that this is not for you, not now, not you.

And here is what I have watched happen in men, and live myself.

We walk right up to the edge. We get close enough to feel it. We can almost sense the freedom waiting on the other side of the gate. And then the guardian shows his face, and we turn around.

We retreat back into what is familiar.

But familiar is not safe. Familiar is just a hell we already know the shape of.

This is why you see grown men living in quiet resentment. Living half a life. Lying awake running through the what-ifs of everything they were too afraid to walk toward. They are not there because they are weak. They are there because they met the guardian and they believed him.

And then there are the other men. Men who feel the exact same fear, the exact same racing heart, and make the movement anyway. They cross. Not because the guardian vanished. Because they finally understood what he was guarding.

The fear was never the wall.

It was the doorway.

I want to be honest about something.

You can get addicted to healing.

Not healing itself. The look of it. I read the books. I followed all the right mentors on instagram. I had the language down so well I could sit in a circle and sound like the most awake man in the room.

And my actual life was not changing.

Because all that information was never the medicine. It was my new hiding place. It felt like progress. It felt like doing the work. But really I was circling the work. Reading about the thing so I would never have to feel the thing.

Nothing moved until I sat down with the real material. What I actually believed about myself. About money. About whether I was worthy of being loved. And underneath all of it, the baseline I kept returning to when everything went quiet.

For me that baseline was shame. Feeling sorry for myself. And the hardest thing I ever admitted was that I had been using it. Using it as the reason I never took full responsibility for my life, my relationships, my relationship with money.

Because you cannot build a new life from the same broken version of yourself that feels sorry for itself most of the time.

It does not work that way. The new reality needs a new internal state. And that part is calling you forward.

Here is what I had to come back to, again and again.

My mind loves to live in two places that do not exist.

The future, running movies about what might happen, handing me a little hit of relief from a fantasy, then dropping me back into a life that had not changed. And the past, drowning me in regret. And regret feels heavy and almost noble, like you are taking your life lessons seriously. But underneath it, for me, it was just one more way to avoid being accountable right now.

So I am learning to discern when both are playing on repeat.

No future. No past. I decided to depart.

And then ask what is actually left.

Just this. Me, here, feeling the full weight of my own body. Heavy or not. Real.

And it leaves one question that I could not escape, and neither can you.

When are you going to take accountability for what is happening inside you?

Because the day I allow myself that license, the outside slowly began to change too. Not because I forced it. Not because I demanded it transform on my schedule. But because I was no longer the same man standing there looking at it.

When I ask a man to sit in his heavy emotions, I am not telling him to rot there.

I am telling him to feel it completely. To move through it. Until that state changes into another state. Because that is the nature of emotion. Energy is not created or destroyed. It only changes texture. The grief becomes something. The shame becomes something. But only if you stay long enough to let it move.

So there are really two ways forward.

Feel your states completely, and let the old self have its death.

Or get bored enough of where you are to finally start making different decisions and sitting with your own internal landscape instead of running from it.

That is the work. Not performing growth. Not collecting the language. Actually living it, because it is worth of being alive. Because it is, in the end, a kind of service. To yourself, to the people who love you, to whatever you understand God to be.

If this landed somewhere in your body rather than just your head, that recognition is the beginning of something.

I hold space for men who are ready to do this work for real. Not to look healed. To actually return.

If you want to talk, my door is open.

Stay open. Stay rooted.

Stay open. Stay rooted.