The Arabic word for patience is "sabr" (صبر).
The Arabic word for cactus is "sabbar" (صبّار).
Same root. Same three letters.
And once you see the connection, you'll never think about patience the same way again.
At some point in life, everything around you might stop making sense. The job you once prayed for no longer excites you. The home you used to find comfort in starts to feel heavy. You'll feel disconnected from your purpose, unsure about your business, distant from your family, tired of trying to hold it all together. It I feel like everything is breaking at the same time. And in that weight, you'll feel this aching need to fix yourself, to fix your life, to go back to the starting point and question if you even chose the right direction. Maybe you're already there. Maybe you're standing in the middle of the chaos right now, watching your relationships shake, your finances shrink, your health shift, and wondering if any of it still makes sense.
If that's where you are, I want you to pause. Just for a second. And remember how far you've already come.
You've carried yourself through more than you give yourself credit for. You've survived days you thought would break you. You'll be okay.
As always
learning lately that a lot of confidence is about owning up. like yeah i'm a little addicted to my phone right now, or yeah i'm not really over this person yet, or yeah i still get pretty anxious in crowds, just saying anything at all but then following it up with, but i'm trying to get better and being super nonchalant and unaffected. so powerful. you would literally be undefeatable in the face of even the most judgmental person. no one can judge you for things you already know about yourself and are trying to improve on. the trick is to know yourself from the inside out, to hold yourself accountable, and to actively improve every day. like that is literally the secret to never feeling like you're at the mercy of somebody else's judgment.
The Arabic word for "human" is insaan (إنسان), it carries two roots.
One means "to forget." The other means "to need companionship."
We forget. And we need each other. Arabic put both truths in one word.
Just learned a new word:
Eremition
(eh-ruh-mish-un)
The act of gradually fading from the lives of others, not out of malice, but a desire for solitude or renewal.
"what are your hobbies:
-UNGODLY PATTERN RECOGNITION
-AGGRESSIVE ACTIVE QUESTIONING
-SILENT OBSERVATION
-REAL TIME THEORY BUILDING
-BEHAVORIAL ANALYSIS
-MICRO EXPRESSION DECODING
-POST CONVERSATION AUTOPSY"
The joy of owning beautiful things, a good knife, a proper linen towel, a jar of excellent honey, one soul encapsulating perfume, over many mediocre things. Doing this slowly across every domain.
masculine energy in its mastered form converges on trickster energy - playfulness, teasing, and trickery
pay attention to all the greatest athletes
they all converge on a trickster playstyle - the greatest ball handlers across any sport always have a trickster essence over them, they dribble and move the ball around through a fluid playful style full of tricks
the same goes for the greatest among any field - the greatest marketeers, lawyers, politicians, philosophers, engineers, etc
take the greatest people across any domain of mastery and if there’s not an essence of trickster over them, then that domain has not yet found its master
psychologically this can be understood as the transformation of self-mastery
the man who takes himself and everything he does too seriously is projecting his own lack of control - the rigidity is a form of insecurity, a mind still trying to wrap itself around everything because it still feels uncertainty
the ironic realization of the mastery of control is that it manifests as a form of play
the constant need for control is relinquished as certainty crystallizes
uncertainty leads to insecurity, which leads to the need to impose control and convince oneself and others, the need for external validations
certainty leads to security, which leads to the relinquishment of ‘direct control’ in favor of ‘indirect control’
as Jung and Nietzsche both said - self-actualization and mastery of the self leads to ‘the child’
to be a child is to be a trickster playing with reality
this is the case for every man I’ve met or studied that was a master of something - in their domain of mastery they were always as a trickster at play