You don't need to go looking for God in the right building, or say the right words in the right order, or find someone to intercede on your behalf. I don't mean this dismissively — I mean it as the most hopeful thing I know how to say. Whatever you're reaching for when you reach upward is already here. It is near you. It is with you. It lives inside you.
There is something holy in each of us — a presence that watches, that knows, that keeps quiet account of who we are and how we live. Not to judge in the punishing sense. More like a compass that always knows which direction you've drifted from. We feel it when we act against it. We feel it when we finally act in accordance with it too — that rare sense of being fully aligned with yourself, of doing exactly what you were made to do.
I've felt it in places, not just in people. In old forests where the trees have grown so tall and close that the light comes through in pieces, and the silence has a particular quality. In the presence of water that runs deep. In open spaces that ask nothing of you. Something in those moments reminds you that the world is larger and older than your problems, and that you are part of it rather than separate from it.
And I have felt it most strongly in certain people — those who remain calm in conditions that undo everyone else. Who are not diminished by hardship or inflated by luck. In whom something steady lives that cannot be borrowed or taken away.
When you encounter someone like that, you feel it. Something in you recognises something in them. A force from the same source.
Here is what I want you to understand about yourself — and I mean this precisely, not as flattery. The things that impress other people about you, the external things, the visible things — none of that is what I value. A golden bit does not make a better horse. The decorations are not the animal. What I value in you is what cannot be given to you by circumstance or taken from you by misfortune. The quality of your soul. The way your reason works when you let it work honestly. These are yours in a way that nothing else is.
What does it actually ask of you, this inner life? Very little, in theory. Only to live in accordance with your own nature. To be what you actually are rather than what the crowd needs you to perform. The simplest thing in the world — and also, given how hard everyone around us pushes in the opposite direction, one of the hardest.
The general madness of the world is that we push each other toward what diminishes us. To resist that current is almost the whole of the work.
You are already resisting it. Keep going.
In quiet admiration,