My North Star
Having faith means knowing something better is on the way; even if you don’t see it with your eyes, you see it within you.
You believe so strongly that its arrival feels inevitable. Often the worst things that happen to us galvanize this faith.
It will not feel good at first, and there will be days when you question, cry, and cannot imagine what it's all for. But if you stay here long enough. Sit through this long enough. Something begins to happen.
All the worries, and the negative narratives simply lose their power over you.
You start to have a blinding desire for what you know in your heart you truly want, and you do anything and everything you can to get it. It becomes the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about before you turn out the lights. I call it my North Star.
My doctor recently discovered that I may have osteoporosis. The potential of carrying a silent bone disease hasn’t deterred me.
It feels like a minor blip on the screen of my life, and I am not afraid of it.
Only one thing in my life occupies my energy: my North Star. It changes the narrative of my life. It drives away any fear that I had.
It’s the reason I type the words you’re reading right now. It gives me the clarity and faith to keep driving forward. When I go to bed at night, I may not have evidence in front of me that something wonderful is going to happen, but I still believe it.
If you dig deep, I think we are all this way when we remember who we are.
When I spoke with Tsering Yangzom Lama, she told me a story about getting into a cab with a MAGA supporter, and by the end of the ride she had convinced him that the things she wanted for society, like equity, fairness, and a future for everyone, were the same things he wanted.
I think about that story a lot.
If we aren’t aware of our North Star, I think we can be awakened to it.
We all share a common decency. We aren’t built to have walls or borders between us.
We were meant to cooperate. We aren't separate from nature, and we aren't separate from each other.
We’ve let false narratives drive our decisions. We overanalyze things that don’t need overanalyzing. I think most people, if they’ve sat in this exhausting fray long enough, can see through these false narratives people spin to confuse us and make us afraid.
It is not that complicated.
Sometimes the best writing I do comes at 5 am, when I’ve exhausted my anxiety loop and gotten clear. The fog of doubt has lifted, and I can see that we are all meant to live together. That is the point.
When people ask me “do you still have faith in humanity” my answer is unquestionably, “yes.”
Mike
Image Credit: The Shimbashi District, Tokyo, Japan. Photo by Mike DiGirolamo. I took this photo because I felt the old brick archways of the rail line set against the skyscrapers evoked a sense of timelessness, permanence and faith. Almost in a way that the future and the past can both co-exist.