Living as a Verb

I was asked to name a step.

It sounded simple enough. A chart. A box. A place to mark where I was.

And yet something in me hesitated—not in resistance, but in accuracy.

What the chart pointed toward didn’t feel like an arrival.
It didn’t feel like an identity.
It didn’t feel like a location I could stand on and say, here.

What felt true was movement.
Ongoing.
Already happening.

I noticed the discomfort wasn’t about whether the step applied.
It was about the assumption underneath the question—that realization asks us to locate ourselves.

But nothing in my lived experience felt locatable.
What was present was steadiness.
Participation.
A kind of ease that didn’t come from being finished.

I realized the chart was asking for a noun,
and my life was answering as a verb.

When that landed, I laughed.
Not a release laugh—more like recognition.
Something unnecessary fell away.

The impulse to explain softened.
The paragraphs I’d been composing in my head evaporated.
One line was enough.

I sent the chart back with almost no words:
Here you go, love Surya.

The reply was just as simple.
Complete.
Nothing to fix.
Nothing to clarify.

Afterward, what stayed wasn’t relief.
It was joy.

Light.
Playful.
Unforced.

The kind that comes when truth doesn’t need to secure its position.

I noticed how familiar this felt.
The same quiet practice I’ve been living into elsewhere:
not rushing,
not proving,
not splitting myself in two under uncertainty.

Learning didn’t stop.
It loosened.

Not as evidence of incompletion,
but as a way of being in motion—
inside something already unfolding.

→ When Self-Location Stops Making Sense