There are the different versions of ourselves, the different lives we have lived, and perhaps even more dangerous, the ones we could have lived. The ones we feel bittersweet over having not pursued, the ones we could see ourselves in, if only just a few choices had been made differently. We wonder where the assorted paths would have led, dream about the hypothetical different realities other than our current one. For me, it’s not so much FOMO as it is feeling like there’s another version of myself out there which I may have abandoned.

Of course it’s a luxury to feel this way, to be able to choose where you live, what jobs you take. But there’s also something to feeling pulled to different realities, to feeling in-between. If you don’t tend to those sides of yourself, they easily feel like they’re disintegrating—firm ground eroding beneath your feet.

Instead, we might see stories as:

“living entities that emerge from and move things in the world. Some of these stories are meant to exist for a long time, others expire early. Some stories are meant to remain as and where they are and to work only with a very select group of people; other stories are meant to travel the world, and to transform and to be transformed by other world-entities … Sometimes [these stories] will hide somewhere in your body, perhaps close to a song that already lives there, and wait for the right time to dance with you.”

sensitivity is a reality that many of us can't imagine living without. In ecology, sensitivity is highly valuable. In Earth systems, sensitivity is highly valuable. Probably in human communities of millennia past, sensitivity was highly valuable. I have to believe that at this moment in time, when we are encouraged to be mechanistic, it is simply being overlooked for the gift that it really is.

On the other end of the spectrum, the gravitational pull of The Future has also knocked me out of orbit. I approached my thirtieth birthday ready to exploit what I had learned about myself in the preceding decade, feeling confident (if not certain) in the direction I wanted to move in, yet comforted that there was enough wriggle room to feel my way through it without a set destination. But it’s as if adding another digit to my age changed those sureties into not-so-sureties almost overnight.

There are two kinds of writing; alive writing and dead writing. Alive writing invokes sensuousness, expansion, and insight. It transforms and enlarges its reader. It is a kind of disclosure; simultaneously immanent and transcendent. Dead writing is passive, sentimental and afraid of telling the truth. It discloses nothing except its own performance. The sentimentality is a front rather than a risk taken. Alive writing is a process wherein you forget it's even writing. Dead writing is a product that is too self conscious for its own good. It is an outcome of not being honest with yourself. It respects neither writer nor reader, instead it presents us with a mirage, having never truly made contact with the real.

That’s the real reward of learning to be sensitive and emotional out in the open: finally learning to cultivate close relationships that are trusting, loving, and mutually supportive. Finally learning to be your whole self without apology. Finally learning to relax and enjoy the love you share without fear.