The Music Is Playing

When you're young, it's all about powerboats.

You're gunning the engine, burning fuel, blasting Metallica, forcing your way to wherever you think you need to be.

Society needs young men to drive powerboats. To push. To build. To will things into existence through sheer exertion. Powerboats are what helped humans conquer some of the brutal realities of our natural existence.

And when you're a young man flying across the water at full throttle, you look at the old guys in sailboats and think: "Look at those idiots. They're not going anywhere. I'm lapping them."

I spent most of my life in a powerboat.

Athletics. The Middle East. Building businesses. Chasing the next milestone. The next target. The next win.

Always driving toward something.

Recently, something shifted.

The Realization

I had an experience that pulled me out of my own head.

The specifics don't matter (happy to share it privately).

What matters is what I felt!

I felt connected to something larger than myself. Generations of people I never met, all rooting for me. Not rooting for me to achieve something. Rooting for me to be alive.

It was a felt sense of being part of something continuous. A river of life flowing through me, not to me.

And in that moment, I finally got it.

The guys in the sailboats aren't idiots.

They figured something out!

When it's up, they move. When it's not, they pop out a book and read. They're enjoying a day on the water, not pumping gas and white-knuckling toward some arbitrary point on the horizon.

They understand something the powerboat guys don't: there is no destination. And even if there is, once you get there, ehhhhhhh.

There's just the dance!

Alan Watts said it perfectly: "We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played."

You can't explain this to the powerboat guy. He won't hear it. He's too busy slamming beers and blasting music.

And that's fine. Society needs powerboat guys. I was one. Maybe you are one right now.

But at some point, you realize something: you can set down your identity as a powerboat driver and begin the journey to become a sailboat captain.

That identity served you well for so long. It got you here. It built what needed building.

But you don't have to carry it anymore.

The music is playing.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon