Something very important happens when you lose a piece of yourself, yet you barely notice the quiet shift at first.
When you lose something very important—like spirituality, like peace of mind—you try to rationalize the void. In this case, I’m talking about spirituality, though you might brush it off as something trivial. You could say, “This is just one thing I happen to lack now, just a minor asset I misplaced along the way.” For whatever reason, you treat it like a simple tool that once made life better, convincing yourself it was always replaceable.
When you lose something very important like that, you don’t instantly break down. You just go along and live your life. You function. You serve society, satisfy the people around you, earn money for yourself, and act out your role as a man or a woman, whatever that means to you. You try to live up to every expectation—the demands you place on your own shoulders and the heavy, unyielding weight of the world around you.
But the problem is subtle and deep.
If you lose something very important like your spirituality or your peace of mind, you deceive yourself. You may tell yourself this is just another secondary thing, but it is so fundamental to your vitality, your wellbeing, and the core of what it means to be human that you will definitely lose yourself along the way.
Spirituality in this case doesn’t mean practicing a specific ritual, clinging to a gimmick, subscribing to a formal religion, or feeling a mystical connection with some divine entity. It is far simpler than that. It is about being calm. It is about having presence, being truly aware, and resting deeply in your body, your emotions, and your head. It is the raw capacity to remain completely still while the chaos of existence swirls around you.
When you lose that, you have nothing to return to when the movement stops.
So you keep moving. You run. And if you cannot stop moving after the momentum has carried you forward, you just keep moving further and further into a state of hollow, restless agitation. This is where the problem kicks in. Because when you lose something very important like your stillness, you go rather unrestful. You wander blindly until you finally realize this was not just something important, nor merely something rather important, but something utterly fundamental to staying alive.
It is all about priority.
It isn’t about neatly sorting your life into arbitrary bins—this is important, that is not important, this matters slightly more. It is about actively observing your existence. It is about waking up and recognizing when something essential, something truly irreplaceable, is leaving you.
