nobody, nowhere: a practical guide on becoming

Embrace the paradox.

Only a somebody could even think of pursuing the path to becoming nobody.

Start anywhere. Anytime.

Anyhow.

Give priority to leisure.

Play first, work later.

Better yet, learn to play while you work.

Call it work anyway.

Have faith that there are already enough humans trying desperately to become even more somebody in this world.

It doesn’t need you to run the same race.

The world doesn’t need you to become anything for it, really.

All it needs is for you to stop looking for the meaning of life and start being it.

Take as many mind-altering, consciousness-expanding drugs as you can get your hands on.

Or don’t.

Learn to dissect pointless advice from the one that you actually need to hear.

Marvel landscapes. Mountains, valleys, lakes and gorges are all teachers of perspective.

Contemplate on the impossibility of pure emptiness as well as the likelihood that everything we know emerges from that impossibility. Weaving together polarities is a useful tool.

Learn agriculture and how organic tissue decomposes.

Find comfort in surrender.

Soften your skin in the face of uncertainty.

Allow the negative energy circulating within you to find the resolution it so badly is looking for.

Hope for nothing. Have trust that there is a bigger organising principle in the world than the individual human mind. Listen to what is actually there and navigate your attention towards what makes most sense to you. Regardless of whether it’s a shout or a hardly audible whisper.

Practice compassion. Even towards yourself.

You are no exception to any rule.

Have purpose, meaning and be guided by love, while you keep letting go of everything you create.

Make yourself at home with whatever is.

When you are still, you are standing in the midst of all possibilities, weaving together worlds and timelines that might otherwise never meet.

Trust your pain.

As fierce as it may seem, it is an invitation for you to come meet it with the same fierceness, that is also inevitably a warmly embracing gentleness.

Revel in the mundane necessities of life.

Find a variety of teachers. Youtube is a plentiful resource.

Cat videos can be as profound of a way as any guru you’ll ever come across.

Ask questions and investigate how to ask them in a way that actually makes a difference.

Look further than where the obvious, easy answers allow you to see.

Hold space for patience and equanimity. You don’t go from being a somebody to being nobody overnight. It happens slowly, then all of a sudden. Why rush it anyway? Attention and focus emerge only through the incessant process of trial and error.

Learn anatomy. Learn the mind of your cellular life. Learn how to become the fluid flowing in and out of the cellular membranes. Learn about the specifics of the massive universal coincidence that carries your name and your memories and is constantly leaving its footprints on this planet.

Value knowledge but don’t settle on it.

Fuck ambition.

Work with discipline nonetheless.

***

Have a careful fall,

Anni