Delhi is all underbelly and overpopulation. It’s chaos, no calm. It’s swimming upstream through stampeding sewers of struggle, filth, and the penniless. Delhi, she’s wild, but there is life in her yellowing eyes. There is kindness in the hearts of her people, and there are flowers, flowers amongst her filth. Her spice markets will tickle your nose, and her chai will show you why.

Her chai is all smashed ginger and boiling brown. It is warmth in winter and the offering of a cooling ’stache sweat in the smoggy summer months. It’s the language of a shared love for the almost, but never too muchness, of flavour. It’s a gift if you are a guest and a place to pause amongst the relentless churning. As Mom would say, chai is “proper”.

Delhi speaks to you and is full of questions. Photo please? Blue eyes real? Where are you from please, ma’am? She also asks you to breathe deeply, even amongst the suffocation of smog. She asks you to trust and be discerning. She asks you to never take your privilege for granted, and she’ll be ruthless in telling you why. Delhi will also show you how she makes broken work, and then she’ll urge you to leave when the shout-like symphony of hooting and highways becomes too much to bear.

I listened, and I left. Satiated by the chaos and hungry in the search for something more spacious. Serendipitously, I found a copy of Kerouac’s On the Road just hours before boarding my bus, which would carry me southwest to this softer land, with mountains introducing the sky and cows sanctifying the streets.

I’ve had three chais since I arrived. The first was within moments of stepping off Naveen Travel & Tours and into the moonlit morning. The second was a gift from my tuk-tuk driver shared around a fire in the street not five minutes later. A gift which is to say, he overcharged me but was nice about it. The third accompanies me now, as I write, with a readiness to drop deeper into the teachings of the motherland.

I am only in the infancy of my journey here, but it’s already clear to me that India is unquestionably a land that gives. Offering its lessons through a tactile derangement of the senses, teaching through layers of texture, noise, colour, and chaos pressing in from all directions. This woven layering of love and madness shifts one’s perception away from the abstract world of mind perception and into the felt, bodily layer of experience, like the way sound is coarse against the skin. And yet, it simultaneously reveals the vastness of that which exists beyond the tactile. That which cannot be touched, named, or even seen, but can be revealed through the liminal realm of emotive perception. This is a land that monsoons the senses so that its floodwaters may carry you into knowing beyond them.

May I humbly accept her teachings in a way that serves the heart of my inspiration, in a way that shows me how to serve both my authenticity and universal oneness. May I learn to be in service of others in all forms by finding new ways to speak with heart when words have no use, and ways to give when money makes no true difference.

In short, I've learnt that India will slap you across your senses, then say I’m sorry, please forgive me, thank you, I love you, you’re welcome. Meaning all of it, and offered through a black-toothed smile and a side of head wobble. Served with this humble all-knowing, tragic and loving kind of cheek.

With a heart wide open, thank you for having me, India.

Photo: Eliza Scidmore for National Geographic.

Source: Pinterest, photographers unknown.

As always, thank you for reading and reflecting back.

I’m grateful for you joining me on this journey and to be able to be here with you in this way.

Writing to you tired and free.

All my lōve,

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky

Written: 08.11.25, the morning of my birthday

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I love the flow of this gel pen. I love being out here in the mountains, away from the city’s flux. I love that the concept of time surrounds me. The ideations of time that have been trickling in over the past few months feel like premonitions now, and I love that too. I love these messages passed through time from the future, like an envelope slipping through the letterbox of our doors of perception. Like a ribbon pirouetting in the wind, waiting for its pocket of past to spin into.

I love that my T’s have taken on this new shape. That my handwriting speaks to my sentiments as much as my words respond to them in translation. I love that the shape of my T’s adds a layer to what I’m writing about, that the page becomes multimedia in a visceral way.

I love that I am surrounded by this tactile externalisation of imagination. As always, we are dreaming this space into life through the wombs of our hearts and the portals of our fingertips. In these spaces lives a palpable sense of anthropomorphism in the materials and pieces gathered. The leather suitcase carries a well-aged personality, one that knows long before you do where it is going to be placed just like the hand-dyed, sun-dried muslin cloth tells you where and how it hopes to hang. The artist is simply the portal and creates most fluidly when they ultimately surrender to the knowing that they are not the creator. Creation creates through the creator and in turn, creates the creator, back and forth, and so on.

I love that as we move through birthing these spaces, we are offered the opportunity to know ourselves. That the manifestation of what is pregnant within us is a process of coming into contact with the depths of ourselves, externalised in abstract form. That the creative process can be an emotional one, a challenging one, a gifting one. To receive these gifts we must move beyond ourselves and see ourselves in everything around us. We must surrender to the creative process so we can better listen to what it has to say about what we cannot yet see within us, what is asking to be felt, freed, understood. The process pushes us beyond ourselves, bringing us closer to ourselves.

We know we have to allow this in order to create something with a message to share, we have to let it so that we ourselves become the paperknife to the letter of the message dropping in through the letterbox.

I imagine painting a wall or creating a stage without heart. I can feel how it would still be light, still beautiful, still visually pleasant. But our bodies know the difference and so do the bodies of those experiencing the piece. The real symbiosis lives in the feeling that comes when we stay attentive to what the creative process is asking of us. When the act of creation begins to move us as much as we move it. When the process takes our hand and we follow. A kind of dance and an intoned agreement to lead and let ourselves be led. To listen, receive, translate.

I truly love the marvel I’ve felt through the heart in the moment I look around, step back, pause, eyes lifted to the domed sky roof of the yurt, and realise the magnificence happening now and now and now, elipsis no full stop. Sitting inside the visual externalisation of heart, spirit, and imagination in matrimony is to witness life itself anthropomorphised. This I love.

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Today I am alive, and my aliveness is beaming with ripe futures, poised on the edge of each moment. Today marks 27 years of co-creating with the process. As a thank you to this aliveness, I am with it in submission to surrender and unconcerned with control, even just for this fleeting twist through time.

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Thank you all for being here, for reading + for reflecting back. This post is unlike my usual shares here on Substack, but I’ve loved the freedom of sharing with you straight from my diary.

Hopefully, by the time the next little letter lands in your mailbox, I’ll be writing to you from the Himalayas. Excited for what’s to come, and for what wants to be shared here.

All my lōve!

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky

This vision offers a deeper meaning to everything it looks upon, has the capacity to stretch our understanding in ways that connect far more dots.

Patterns emerge more clearly, the mundane has new life, deeper meaning.

Our awareness of the synchronistic becomes highly attuned. We begin to pick up on a frequency that before fell on numbed senses.

Birth, death and love, a window of time that lifts our senses, heightens and intertwines them in a way that stretches beyond our usual perception.

Maybe these experiences evoke an absolute presence with what is. A physical stunning, a shock to the system that arrives as a reminder to listen to a call from the beyond. One that stretches through time and space to deliver a message of the magnitude of everything’s interconnectedness.

You walk the same road you’ve walked for years, yet with new eyes. The sun-silhouetted flower, a message from your lover. The cicadas song lifts the hairs on your arms now as you hear the head of their call like never before. The sun is hot because the cicadas sing, the cicadas sing in the heat of the sun.

The dance of light on water is a sonnet, the peeling paint of a building a mirror to decay.

Metaphors found in everything, everything a metaphor for life, love and death.

Nostalgia, presence, awe, and the earth shattering vulnerability of mortality, the lenses through which you now see.

These three potent passages arrive as our initiation into seeing beyond objective reality. And with each, a gift of rebirth.

Life and death exist within their own perfect, quantum balance. Love is the thread of their connection.

Life, like death, is freedom.

Death, like life, is the heaviness of embodiment.

The exquisite magnetism of having a body that feels, fears, desires, decays. That pulls and pushes us on our way through time.

We walk this earth in the constant paradox of breath, of holding on, and of letting go. Each moment passes as a miraculous gift stolen by time, a gift towards death nonetheless.

Presence, our only salvation.

To see with the awakened eyes remembered through birth, death and love is to live in a state of perpetual reverence.

A deepening into mortal humility and absolute awe for existence even happening at all.

This vision doesn’t baptise us of our sorrow but sanctifies it. It births art from our pain and shows us that to truly live is to relentlessly brush the edges of death.

Love and grief kiss each other goodnight yet love is our salvation, our silent protest to the injustice of not feeling. Love cries out from the infinite landscape of our echoing hearts, charts the topography of our humanness, is the river rhythm of our lifeblood that flows forever forwards beyond form.

To love is to revere death, to honour life, to hold not onto, but up in both palms, that which is transient. The ultimate offering.

I read something that suggested that to die is to be loved so wholly by the ultimate complexity of life, the mystery, that we must dissolve back into it.

In this miracle of mirrored metaphors, fleeting beauty and synchronistic symbols, it seems that death is not the opposite of life but rather its deepest reflection.

Or perhaps what death is to life is what the singularity is to the black hole.

The singularity, a place where the gravitational pull of light and space-time curvature become infinite. Death as the silent core to which all things return.

And maybe the cosmic poetry of the love of our lives is the Hawking radiation. Because even black holes, the devourers of light, still emit miracles in the form of radiance.

However it may be, whatever metaphor we might believe, we will still traverse our relative forevers over the mountains of life, love and death.

And we must honour this quantum balance within the knowing that the higher the mountain, the longer the shadow that falls. We must taste our tears for good luck.

We’ll have to let death be our free fall, life be the parachute, love be the safety. Or maybe it’s all the other way around?

I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. But I feel & feeeeeeeel & feel.

Feeling is the only truth I know how to fully comprehend.

artist unknown, source: pinterest

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Thank you all for being here, for your support, for your reflections and for your gentle presence as I nourish the ebbs and flows of my inspiration with patience. I am deeply grateful x

All my lōveeeeee,

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky

Suspended somewhere between water, sky, and mossy rock, I looked up toward a giant. The infinity of time curled, cracked, and gnarled its way up ochre bark, revealing itself in one of its grandest physical forms—a Giant Sequoia.

I dreamt of the wild, wind-in-her-hair Pocahontas while floating in the crisp river and saw movies flash behind my eyes. I imagined stories of the lives the natives once lived here, in the perfection of a natural paradise—a place where Great Spirit is heard reverberating through everything like a heartbeat in love. Like a waterfall pouring down from the heavens, made only of the tears of doting gods.

That day, in that place, Great Spirit was so loud—its music, its chime.

I heard it through the hum accumulated by the flitting of bugs, the calls of birds, their wings, the water paving its relentless path, the rocks giving way to the force of its flow, the decaying branches shape-shifting beneath the bedrock.

Even the light seemed to sound as it caught the water, bouncing from beetle wing to blade of grass, to wild lily along the riverbed’s edge. It danced across rocks, trees, and leaves, pulsing beneath the skin of the world, carrying its melody through the bones of the land.

The hum of the earth. Mother Earth. The vocal cords of the divine.

Here, in this paradise, my sensory perception was entwined: form implied time, light implied sound, decomposition implied life, and all implied one.

There was so much to be heard that day that I just lay there, suspended in the icy creek—eyes a mirror to the sky, floating, in awe, and in love.

How could I look at something so godly, so infinitely blooming and dying and blooming, and not fall into the awe that adorns the rooms of reverence itself?

Sequoia National Park was a cathedral of the divine in every single thing, and my bodily being wanted to pray.

So I did.

I rose from my dream pool, dried, wrapped myself in my most sentimental sarong, and knelt before the All—which happened to be personified in the silver magnificence of a granite rock face that pushed itself thousands of feet into the heavens above. My kind of cathedral.

Hands in lap, holding each other as if I were gently holding myself, other, and everything as one, I looked up to the sky and prayed.

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Prayer, for me, is different every time—sometimes it’s flow, sometimes it’s plea, most of the time it’s just me talking out loud as I walk down the street, headphones in, so the world thinks I’m on a call and not just crazy, speaking to the sky.

It can go on for minutes or hours—sometimes prayers spiral in and out of my awareness for weeks.

But that day, my prayer was short and sweet:

“I am listening,” I said.

“What do you want to say?”

My heart intoned a desire to hear more clearly, to tune into something beyond the spectacle of the choir - something precise - something like a jazz lounge in a bottle: velvet, intimate, a message more personal.

Prayer spoken, meaning intoned, I nestled my body, heart, and soul into a mossy rock that day. Into the river, the stream. Into the ancient of the redwoods, the embodiment of time.

My body was more prayer than words could have ever been as I placed my heart on a granite platter and gave it to God.

Knowing, in a way that only trust can comprehend, that my prayers were already answered. That I simply had to arrive to the moment where they were wrapped in a bow, ready to be received.

And the answer came sooner than I thought— that very evening, while I was lying in a rickety lounger just outside the gypsy wagon that we called home for the time being. With my belly fuuuull—full of laughter—I threw myself back onto the lounger, my arms above my head, hands holding each other once again.

And as I lay there, letting the remnants of the laughter serve its medicine to the rest of my being, I looked ahead at the blackest night, the brightest stars, and a huge silhouette of a heart made by the meeting of two trees.

When I noticed it, I launched myself back up and literally had to rub my eyes all cartoon-esque to make sure I was seeing straight, my mouth now a smiling gape. But true as true—there it was, a picture-perfect heart, filled to the brim with stars and sky.

I couldn’t really believe how perfect it was—and how it had been there, unnoticed, just above me the whole time. This picture of a heart, beaming down upon me from one of my favorite views ever: the night sky.

I spent the rest of the night looking into that heart.

When I close my eyes now and think of that day and night—of all the laughter, conversation, and deeply loving company shared—I see it in the picture of those two trees forming a heart, the cosmos, and one old, halos-in-my-eyes, fairy-lit gypsy wagon.

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She was old, small, and had a big personality—the essence of wild witch meets pirate at sea. She was the perfect little home for the night, and from the inside, she looked wildly similar to the cabin of the ’80s sailboat I was living on at the time. Much like an old car with its quirks and sensitive persona, the gypsy van needed very specific treatment.

Amongst (many) other things, the door had to be lifted a couple centimeters and then propped behind a chair to the left to stay in place without slamming shut—or potentially even falling off. And when, the morning after the prayer-day, heart-in-the-sky night, I had just finished stowing the gypsy cabin as we readied to leave, the other half of the answered prayer came through.

It happened to be hidden behind that frail door, perched precariously two centimeters up and left. As I closed the door, I noticed a sweet little sign just behind the handle, probably hoarded by the eccentric lady who owned the place.

“Listen to your heart,” it said, amongst peeled paint and moss decay.

Listen to your heart.

Never had something spoken so directly to me in my life before.

You know, the feeling of it?

And never in a million years would I have guessed that I’d feel the way I did, looking at a piece of décor I’d probably find in my granny’s kitchen next to “Live, Laugh, Eat.”

But there it was—a literal sign. And I stood before it: frozen. Alive. Heard. Listening. Awestruck.

You know when you hear something or someone speak, and the feeling of what you’re hearing stretches so far beyond the words being said?

Or when you find the perfect metaphor for the biggest idea and wrap an entire philosophy into a single visceral sentence?

Or that feeling of spiritual communion—of looking into your partner’s eyes, watering with the love you share?

That feeling of God. The divine. Great Spirit. When you feel it, you know it, and there’s no denying any of it.

It’s the realest real, wrapped in the invisible, made tangible by the way your body responds to the nuances and synchronicities. The way your hair raises or breath catches or body moves in response.

Words are too inert to ever describe it completely without the tools of poetry and subjective translation.

It’s something that cannot be understood by the mind alone—it demands the cooperation of our cellular memory and intuitive understanding.

It’s a body wisdom. When God speaks, you listen with your body, you remember with your body, you know with your body.

That day, that night, that morning, my body knew. She knew, she knew, she knew that I was being told to listen to my heart - and she could feel that the heart itself was both prayer and answer, ready, wrapped in a bow, received.

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Nature is our cathedral. She is our temple, our holy place.

She speaks in ways our bodies were created to comprehend.

She is the holy text and the answer to our prayers.

And all she asks is that we enter into conversation with her and she will gift us her stillness of voice within. Prayers answered in conversational dance with life itself.

I believe that it is imperative for all of us to find our prayer.

To talk to the sky.

To move our body in prayer.

To throw flowers into the sea.

Stir love into our tea.

Turn that love into honeycomb and place it at the altar of our prayer.

Transform the words of our mind into a tool and pair them with heart and a touch too much of reverence and then some.

Life is brimming with a fullness that is incomprehensible by the mind alone. It cannot be cognised. It is rich with absolute wisdom, marrow, miracle, transcendental beauty and the pulse of the infinite itself.

It has always has been so—simply awaiting our arrival to this ribbon wrapped, embodied knowing.

When we connect with this, we tap into a wisdom that stretches across multiple lineages. Our beings become altars, our daily lives, the ritual. We begin to weave the divine into the mundane, transmuting our repressed, egoic selves into ones capable of both giving and receiving in equal measure with a vigour that exudes peace.

So please, please, for Gods sake, let’s let ourselves hear it all, feel it all. Commune with it all—speak it into the sky, the stars, let it bounce back off granite cathedral peaks and follow the lead of its echo.

And for the sake of us all, let our prayer look however we want it to. Its never been more important, in today’s world, because prayer will be and has been a prerequisite to life since and throughout without end, amen.

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Listen to the Spotify Episode here x

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Thank you for reading, thank you for being here. There is so much more I want to share with you.

xo

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky

2022 was the most intense year of my life.

I lost too many things, and I took too many things away. I lost a life and nearly lost my own. At times, I thought I wanted both of those things, but deep down I really didn’t. I tore trust apart like a page full of mistakes and threw it into a fire. I watched the sparks rise against a desert sky, saying goodbye to something that should’ve been full of love, but wasn’t because I didn’t know how to let it in then. I excavated the rocks from rock bottom, only to find there was no floor. It seemed that I, too, was nowhere to be found, figuratively, at times, literally.

In between and amongst all of this, I found new corners of the world and created many too. I painted and played and danced beautifully in between these worlds—literally, and always figuratively. I witnessed love in a gypsy who wore a white dove on his shoulder and went by the name Valentin Dey. I watched movies from a computer screen perched atop an upside-down crate on a bridge in Berlin with my best friend, and it felt so five-star. I tasted the freedom I was feverishly seeking and, for a silly second, felt like the poster child of the liberated.

I cracked so wide open I couldn’t see the sides I needed to Kintsugi1 together yet.

I was suffering from an overabundance of life2, an abundance of grief and a wobbly case of absolutely ungrounded.

The entire spectrum of emotions collapsed into a laughing sob—and at times, it felt like feeling everything, all at once. For most of 2022, it felt like I couldn’t see clearly - either from the otherworldly halos my tears of laughter created around everything I looked at, or from eyes too weary to open from the night before’s grief.

It was the most earth-shattering period of my life that left me winded and redirected.

Now, in retrospect, (you beautiful thing) I see how that year taught me a lot about regret and how redundant it would become to the scope of my life’s necessities. Even in the face of all the mistakes I make—especially in the face of them.

Artwork by Eric Thompson

Because regret, essentially, told me to stay put. To remain in the victimhood of the wounded ego that wrestled with the truth of my own failure.

Regret negated my ability to see the lesson in the mistake because when I sat with it, I found myself in the energy of looping through the storyline over and over as if I could somehow find an escape route to the court room where I could plead my case. Not guilty! Not guilty! Because look, I’m suffering too…

It delayed my ability to accept: guilty as charged, sit with that and learn from it.

Sure, the way that I experience regret could be very different to the way you do. It’s situational. But there’s an underlying essence to it that doesn’t sit right with me. I see its potential, its “don’t you dare do that again” lesson, that “fool me once, won’t fool me twice” essence.

But all regret does for me is keep me stuck in the loophole of shoulda, coulda, woulda. Poor me, I wish I didn’t but I did, so now I (willingly) suffer. That doesn’t work for me, it didn’t then and it doesn’t now.

Because if we’re going to talk about the evolution of self through retrospective learning, we have to acknowledge that true growth begins with ownership.

Taking responsibility for our missteps without falling into ego-driven victimhood creates incredibly solid groundwork for growth. Growth that is in integrity with our highest self. When we can master this, we give ourselves the opportunity to find true compassion for our past selves-for the version of us that simply didn’t know better and that we wish to protect in the future.

Bravely owning our mistakes creates an honest foundation for growth—one that becomes especially revolutionary when those mistakes were born from dishonesty. When we can look back at ourselves—truly look, without flinching and bare witness to the errors of our ways without distortion, we begin to develop a kind of kinship with that past self. And that space—free of judgment, free of shame—accepting the reality of what was, becomes the bridge back to alignment with who we want to become.

Conversely, when we try to better ourselves from the distorted lens of regret, one that, for me, often walks hand in hand with self-criticism and the belief that something is inherently wrong with myself—the path to clarity becomes far more difficult. Sure, we may still arrive to the pitstop along this infinite path where we feel that we are all the wiser, but arriving to that point while dragging the weight of regret from the past makes that journey a lot more taxing.

So in this sense, and at least from my humbled perspective, regret doesn’t really facilitate growth, it obscures it.

Holding this outlook close and looking ahead at what is to become of this path, this life, I see that there should be more time spent creating who we want to be as opposed to fixing ourselves into someone better.

Because constantly leaning into the need for healing implies that something is always broken.

By acknowledging that the matter of our life, good, bad, and ugly, is actually a valuable medium with which we paint the canvas of our becoming, we begin to embody the knowing that we are already healed and whole.

The line between healing and creation is easily blurred, both are part of the same process through which we shape ourselves, but the difference between them changes our entire experience of it. With this in mind, we return to the practice of intention—an art that holds the power to transform anything we weave it into.

Ironically, my journey with regret has taught me that there is nothing inherently wrong with us. Where I once saw broken I now see metamorphic opportunities for brutal honesty and, in effect, the maturation of a brave heart in the face of everything that tries to convince us otherwise.

Pablo Picasso,1953

We hold a force within us so divine and pure and full of light that the mistakes we make should be honoured as our expression of this intelligently organised chaos of creation making sense of itself.

Our cause and effect should be honoured as divine brilliance, experiencing the fullness of its potential with a foresight that transcends rational comprehension.

When all is said and done, what we perceive as right or wrong is entirely our choice, and the narrative we choose makes all the difference. Which is to say—nothing is ever really and truly said and done, thanks to the malleability of the stories of our lives.

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I hope that we can all begin to give ourselves the permission to let regret fall away like a deliberately lucky pinch of salt over the shoulder. Because we can choose to be the creators, not the wounded in need of fixing.

We get to choose the way in which we remember our lives and the recognition of that is one of our greatest strengths when paired with the infinite force of imagination. I believe that when we acknowledge and embody this, we’ll watch our lives transform in the relative blink of an eye.

It’s always been up to us.

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Thank you for reading, thank you for being here. There is so much more I want to share with you.

xo

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky

It seems that I am avoiding another Monday in Spain where the sun doesn’t shine and I miss home, because for the last month, everything—including me—seemed to be moving like slime through a fine mesh sieve.

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Of late, I’ve been haunted by the idea that there are countless creatives who never become artists, too many writers who never become authors, and a whole bouquet of romantics who never find lasting love.

I’m only haunted by this reality because I’m consistently being reminded that I, in fact, am responsible for creating my life. Every bit of it from the vision board, to the business plan, the hiring and firing (learning and unlearning) the accounting (aka learning how the f to money like an adult), climbing Maslow’s pyramid, etc. etc.

It takes effort to move and shake under the weight of this gravity-bound world and is a huge responsibility, to say the least. One that, paradoxically, is as liberating as it is crushing. Unfortunately, the one way to expand our freedom is to narrow our focus1 and I happen to be a woman who wants to have a little taste of it all. Not too much to avoid saturation, but just enough to sustain the journey ahead. Never overly investing there to avoid losing too much here, kinda thing.

And yes, I know what you’re probably thinking—this attitude might not get me very far, or maybe I have some commitment issues. And well, even if you aren’t, I certainly am. But that’s a whole other can of worms we’ll have to gently pry open in another too-early morning meandering. In the meantime, I may or may not have a point to make.

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Let's rewind approximately 2 weeks, free as a bird, alone, still in Spain, still no sun, only at this point just slightly homesick and a growing list of potential to-dos with a relative case of the avoidance bug. Each day, waking up slightly later, each task seeming slightly bigger and nothing getting done for a too-long period of time. Long enough for me to question my ability to actualise anything at all. It seemed that I couldn’t wriggle myself out of the straight jacket of the responsibility of, well, everything.

Which I know seems a bit excessive and overly sensitive but anxiety is like that.

It's the jest that hurts feelings.

I was anxious. Somehow crippled by my freedom, my need to achieve, and my deep desire to create, to weave this life of mine into something meaningfully marvellous.

But there always seems to come a time in the anxiety soup when we have to look in the mirror, be frank with ourselves, and own up to how and why we got ourselves into that hot pot in the first place. Because let’s be real, it's mostly self-induced.

And when the time came for me to look into the metaphorical mirror, what I saw was the root cause of it all:

AVOIDANCE

In big fat capitals, way too loud, even for the people in the back.

And in italics, it read:

You can’t move forward if you can’t take the first step. Stagnation is that unfortunate pool turned green & left behind by the river.

There I was, no one to answer to from 9-5, freer than quite a few really, and yet avoiding doing anything at all with that privilege. The perfect little recipe for subconscious self-doubt turned anxiety.

It seemed that by avoiding the things that required my attention, I was unknowingly making suites for them in my body and decorating the walls with my angst.

Crippled by the infinite possibilities of my own potential, much like that place of power, just above the naval, that turns its blocked energy inward against itself.2 Maybe because I felt and sometimes still feel bound by the societal taxation that dangles self-actualisation in front of the treadmill of systematic dependency.

And I know my experience is universal, because let’s face it, this freedom of choice thing can sometimes seem like an illusion in the mirage of a power structure that is only sustained by our reliance upon it. One that we’ve been taught to willingly give our power to before we’re even fully conscious individuals.

“There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love, and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.

… if the economic, social, and political conditions … do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality, … this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical to doubt, with a kind of life that lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission … even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.”3

While Erich Fromm considers our two most promising antidotes to the alienation of aloneness — love, and work (and I sip my 10th cup of tea thinking about it all) he also narrates something deeply familiar: the urge to escape freedom’s weight, whether through distraction, submission, or the kind of passive waiting that keeps us circling the life we want rather than stepping into it - relatable for so many of us who live a life we have to, in the hopes of one day living the life we actually desire.

I desire to be sitting in circles with women, naked or at least bare enough to see our wide-open hearts, in vulnerable conversation considering the magnificent meaning hidden in the mystery of it all. Honouring the infinitesimal odds of us even existing at all. Finding creative ways to express these heart-mind meanderings in a way that nurtures union and societal co-creative co-operation.

But, as life admin and the very headline of Productivity Today will have it, it seems I have to work pretty hard at orchestrating that to be my everyday.

Yet, maybe somewhere in between this all is the point and purpose - that this life we live becomes a place of profound motive when we connect our life work with heart lead action. When that life work is built upon a foundation that aims to add to the world, to our communities and culture, and to nourish all it touches.

Maybe, when we recognise and utilise the available tools and loopholes of the system itself and by example, inspire others to do the same, we can brush fate aside with our free will and simply step off the treadmill, or at least turn the speed down enough to notice that it doesn’t all have to get done at once.

When we just break it down into little scrumptious bites instead of giving ourselves a sore tummy trying to eat the whole cake

Or, when we shake off the fear so that we can step into the heart, which from my experience knows where to go and exactly how to get us there.

When we add “get” in front of “to do” and smile into the metaphorical mirror of the existential phase that manifested as this anxiety, return the permission slip of the self-induced self- doubt soup and acknowledge that we’ve paid our dues to the system that belongs to the world we chose to incarnate in.

When we gently quiet the mind and open the heart so that we may lay our actions down like seeds in the soil, like flowers in the sea, and watch as the weaving creates the tapestry.

Avoidance, doubt, and self-imposed stagnation are just part of the dance. But when we lay our thoughts down, when we take that first bite, the next step reveals itself. And maybe that’s all it takes— which in my case means stealing a little daylight from tomorrow to unearth the path that was there all along.

And this morning has reminded me of just that.

We’re offered a chance to see into ourselves when we pacify our jumbled thoughts by laying them out in plain sight and surrender them to be witnessed and honoured. The metaphorical mirror of the page, the screen. A scrumptious nibble, the first step, a remembering.

If there’s anything I could have hoped to achieve from this stream of consciousness, it’s a reminder—to myself, to you—that we are both the architects and the purveyors of our own becoming. That avoidance is just the mind’s way of buying time for the heart to catch up. But when left unchecked, will keep us there, stuck. That the weight of possibility doesn’t have to paralyse us if we’re willing to acknowledge the privilege of choice and take just one small step forward.

And no matter what, there is always a choice, there is always something you can do and that first step—of many—is always enough.

Jean Arp, ‘L’Etoile’ (The Star), 1956

Thank you for reading, thank you for being here. There is so much more I want to share with you.

‘Till next time,

Hannah aka Deliberately Lucky.

© [Hannah Kennedy] [2025]. All Rights Reserved.

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