Give more than you take

Broadly, there are two stages to growth. Healing, which often focuses on the past, understanding the past, accepting it and moving on. This can be powerful as sometimes there are moments in the past which can be realised as one's biggest strengths and pointers to who they truly are. Past a baseline point of healing, one can focus more on growth. Of course, healing and growth can overlap and function together but broadly speaking, one may not be able to grow until they heal some fundamental traumas.

For both healing and growth (to make journaling easier, I will consider the two terms separately), giving is such an underrated self-healing mechanism. We must consider beyond oneself. We must. And of course there is a need to balance, giving and taking. But we do not give enough. Think about the times you are not doing well, you may have a cold, you may have had a tough day at work, you may have fought with your partner, you may have lost someone close to you... In our society, we often take medicine, we take certain services to feel better, we take time from others to feel better about our situations. There is a great deal of taking and consumption. We take in social media of course.

Giving is often misunderstood. One may think giving social media content on motivation may be a form of giving. Giving spare change to the homeless person may be giving. Yes, these are forms of giving but it can be simpler. Giving a smile to a stranger walking past. Giving way to someone while driving. There are many opportunities to give, in a simple way, that we often neglect because we put pressures on ourselves such as time constraints, all of which are also important to have a functioning society too. Again, it's a balancing act that often gets blurred in the daily matrix of life. When you feel tired or your battery is low, try giving something and feel the amount of energy you can feel.

In a more abstract sense, letting go is also a form of giving. You need to give a lot of strength, deliberation and discipline to truly accept and let go of things. This act of letting go is both a combination of taking and giving. It takes a lot of energy to let go of a tight and angry fist. You give a lot of time to do this too, there's always an inverse to everything, like the glass half full/half empty analogy. And yes, giving and taking can be seen as the same thing! We think too much sometimes, I definitely do, but we also feel too many emotions: it's all a balancing act where neutrality thrives. And of course, the centre will not always hold, and that is okay too. Being okay with this is also part of neutrality/enlightenment/inner peace. Peace with what is happening is the ultimate form of living! I'm on a tangent.

To help understand this, I look towards manifestation. Terms like manifestation and conjuring have a stigma to them as if there is some magic or higher entities pulling the strings. Let's simplify, manifestation is just simply putting your mind to something and producing a result. Everything in life, the phone you are using, the car you drive, the bus you take, someone has thought of it and then taken the necessary actions to make it tangible. And of course, it takes time to create, more than it takes to destroy. The positive thought exercise I often encourage, I say 15 seconds of playing a positive narrative will help you feel better. It's harder to do 15 seconds of playing a positive narrative than a negative one. Manifestation is the same and it definitely applies easier to negative ones. It's easy to manifest negativity, people do it all the time. I think metaphors are so powerful as they represent manifestations of physicality, relevant to the conjurer's context.

In light of this, I'm currently day 4 into not speaking anything negative about anyone for 30 days. There are many days in minute day to day, where I think negatively of someone or something. Someone cut me off while driving, someone gave me a dirty look etc. etc. But manifestation is often what we do with that. There is indeed a space between an incident and a reaction and it is controlling what happens in between. Interestingly, the more we invest our time into something and then it is thrown off course slightly by something or someone, we manifest the natural negative emotion that comes out. Was it really thrown off course? Could this 'obstacle' be used as an opportunity? Positivity is a powerful manifestation which I once thought was just lofty unpractical idealism. We need to constantly remind ourselves, constantly make mistakes and keep balancing that fine equilibrium over and over. Writing has been an excellent form of healthy manifestation for my soul and identity. The time it takes and the mind power it takes to organise thoughts into fruition has saved me countless doubting, reaffirmed what I truly believe in at the time and helped me come to terms with who I was in the past and why.