And just like that, I was nine months old again, crying out into the vast, empty night, surrounded by a harsh cacophony of beeping machinery. The terror was so acute that it rattled through me as a violence of its own. Without the architecture of language, it came to me as a force black and bereft of life.” 

As a mental health professional and student of Buddhism, I do know this: much of the felt sense of self is an illusion that inevitably breaks. Maybe a traumatic event fractures the narrative of self. Or your ego slowly unravels as you approach death. Maybe you dare to let go of all your hopes and fears, your conceptual frameworks, and sit broken with nothing to do or land on. However it may come to be, there is a vast space within us waiting to consume our smallness, waiting to breath up through our hearts and rewild us, to show us what it means to live fully and soulfully.

We paused for an entire year, creating a space in our lives that few generations have ever seen. And within that space, questions arose. Unbidden and sometimes unconscious, they climbed into our lives to upend and scrutinize who we’ve become. Why do we work so hard?