Full Circle: The Work Is You
“All real living is meeting.”
— Martin Buber
We forget the core. We find an idea that works for us, then we try to make the world wear it. We defend the label, the role, the badge. We forget that every role is temporary. Doctor, chancellor, prime minister, worker, teacher, artist. These are useful clothes. They are not the body. When we hold them too tightly we start to fight and to blame.
We resist change because it shakes the rigid ego. Yet life is fresh, always moving. Forms rise and fall within awareness. Call it emptiness. Call it God. Call it space. Call it silence. It has no name.
What really matters is not what you do. What matters is how you relate while you do it. The observer becomes the observed. The gardener becomes the garden. When you give yourself fully to the task, the separation between you and the task becomes thin.
Attention turns simple work into honest art. You meet the other with care. You treat your role with humility. Respect appears in your voice, in your hands, in your timing. This is the core.
“The observer is the observed.”
— J. Krishnamurti
A relationship is always present. You are never doing anything alone. You are in relation with people, with tools, with place, with time, with the field of life itself. When you act, you touch the web. What you do to the web, you do to yourself.
“What harms the hive harms the bee.”
— Marcus Aurelius
Interconnectedness is not a fancy idea. It is how life works every day. When you breathe, trees and plants make the oxygen you use, and you give them carbon dioxide in return. When you turn on a light, the electricity may come from a river far away turning a turbine.
When you send a message on your phone, that phone exists because miners, factory workers, engineers, ships, and cables all played a part. Every action is linked to nature and to many people. Nothing stands alone, so our choices always touch more than just us.
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
— John Muir
When we forget this, we start to take the play too seriously. We turn learning into fear. We give F grades like stamps of identity. We shout at students and at colleagues because we are shouting at our own insecurity. Yet identity can relax. Let it soften. Let it be a tool, not a cage.
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.”
— Lao Tzu
Emptiness is not a void to fear. It is wide space. In that space, forms rise and fall. Jobs begin and end. Roles open and close. You are the space that can hold them. From this space, love can move. Action becomes cleaner. Praise and blame have less power. You can serve without the hunger to control.
“Wisdom tells me I am nothing. Love tells me I am everything. Between the two my life flows.”
— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
You will still prune the tree, teach the class, code the app, hold the patient’s hand. Only now the posture is different. You are not proving yourself through the task. You are giving yourself to the task. You let attention, kindness, and courage shape the quality of your action. The observer becomes the observed. The gardener becomes the garden.
Rumi hints at this with a simple turn of words.
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”
— Rumi
If there is no sense of interconnection in a given moment, that is fine too. There is emptiness. Rest there. Let breath move. From that quiet, the next form will show itself. Then give your best to that form. Not because the role defines you, but because the way you meet the role reveals you.
“We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness.”
— Thich Nhat Hanh
What you do matters less than how you do it. Every job can become a practice of respect. Every meeting is a mirror. Every task is a chance to remember the web. When you act from the heart, the line between you and the world softens. The work is you, and you are the work. Forms will keep changing. The core remains clear. Give your best, and let it be enough.
Chapter 67 — The Three Treasures
All under heaven say that my Way is great.
It does not look like anything.
Because it is great, it does not look like anything.
If it looked like something, it would have become small long ago.I have three treasures. I hold them and keep them.
The first is compassion.
The second is moderation.
The third is not trying to be first.With compassion one can be truly brave.
With moderation one can be truly generous.
By not putting oneself first one can endure and can lead.If you are brave without compassion,
if you give without moderation,
if you rush to be first,
this is the path to loss and to death.Compassion brings victory in battle and steadiness in defense.
When Heaven chooses to save, it protects through compassion.
Full Circle
I set out not to run, but to grow
to gather lessons only chaos could give
Now I return
not the same man who departed
but one who has walked through storms
carrying ashes, dreams
and the quiet fire of survival
Full circle is not a return
it is a spiral
the same ground beneath my feet
but higher, wiser
etched with scars only I can read
Yes, my stomach trembles with old ghosts
but the fire is still alive within
Full circle
not an end
but a beginning disguised
Hope. Trust. Progress.
The first is compassion
The second is moderation
The third is not claiming to be first in the world
Hope. Trust. Progress.
Full circle
Who am I
Phew, phew, phew, phew
Blowing out the masks
Blowing out the names
Empty, empty, empty, empty
Nothing to hold
Nothing to claim
Now… right here, right now
What does this emptiness want to be
A river A flame
A dance A breath
Who am I
Phew, phew, phew, phew
The question dissolves
And the answer is free
Now… what does that Free want to be
A silence A song
A hand reaching
or the space between
This is the story
not yours not mine
Only Life
living itself
Live it
Live it
Live it
Live it
Until even “living”
is no different from “being”
Until even “being”
is no different from “emptiness”
Here
Only breath
only fire
only this
NOW
“Make things easier for yourself and for others, both are one.”
NOW
Love it, love it, live it, live it
The Divine lives only in the now
in the past or future it is only the ego that lives
“Right here, right now, exactly where I am supposed to be.”
“Full circle from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb we come, an ambiguous, enigmatical incursion into a world of solid matter that is soon to melt from us like the substance of a dream.”
― Joseph Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces
He is saying that life is a full circle. We come from the womb, and we return to the tomb — birth and death are two sides of the same mystery. Our entry into the world is ambiguous and puzzling, because we appear for a short time in a world that seems solid and real. Yet this “solid world” does not last. It melts away like a dream when we leave it.
Life is a mysterious cycle, where birth and death are part of the same circle, and the world we take as solid is actually fleeting, like a dream.
