The Courage to Walk Towards What Calls Us
In a few weeks, I will board a plane to Mexico.
For years the move has existed somewhere on the horizon. Part dream, part intention, part practical exercise in planning and patience. There have been spreadsheets and budgets, Spanish lessons and visa enquiries, hopes and contingencies. There have been moments when the dream seemed impossibly distant and moments when it suddenly felt very close.
Now it is close.
There are boxes half packed in a spare room. A folder of documents I check more often than I need to. Friends ask, with real curiosity, what it will be like, and I notice I no longer have a tidy answer. The closer the date gets, the less certain I sound, even though I have never been more prepared.
And I have found myself asking a question many of us ask quietly, especially in later life.
What if I have been optimistic all my life, and reality is finally catching up with me?
At sixty, that question carries a different weight than it might have at thirty.
How We Know Before Language
This piece sits beside a wider body of work about perception. Some of that writing began with tarot and intuitive practice, but the deeper question has always been how we know what we know before we have language for it. I have been tracing three layers. Material perception sees objects. It looks at the flight booked, the money in the account, the visa stamped or not yet stamped. Symbolic perception sees relationships. It builds the story: brave or foolish, wise or naive, the person who finally did it or the person who should have known better. Intuitive perception senses pattern-change before language catches up to it. It is the layer underneath the other two, registering that something has shifted long before you have a sentence ready to describe what.
Standing at the edge of my own threshold, I have been living out all three at once. And I have learned something about where I keep getting it wrong.
It isn’t really about Mexico.
It isn’t even about money.
What if I have mistaken hope for wisdom?
What if I have spent a lifetime believing things would work out, and life is about to present a bill I cannot pay?
And underneath that, the real question.
What if I have got myself wrong?
Asking a Symbolic Question of an Intuitive Experience
Here is the problem, named plainly. I have been asking a symbolic question of an intuitive experience. I have been trying to find out whether I am wise or foolish, brave or reckless, right or wrong, when the thing actually present in me has never been a verdict at all. It has been a feeling. And a feeling is not waiting to be judged. It is waiting to be read.
A feeling is not waiting to be judged. It is waiting to be read.
This is where most of us go wrong at a threshold, and it is worth slowing down to see why.
Readiness on Paper and Readiness in the Body
Material perception is the easiest register to default to, because it gives you something to check. Did I save enough. Did I plan enough. Are the documents in order. It feels productive because it produces answers. But it cannot tell you whether you should go. It can only tell you whether you are ready to.
I have a ledger for this. Visa requirements, bank statements, a checklist that gets longer the closer the date gets. Every item ticked off feels like progress, and in a narrow sense it is. But finishing the checklist has never once answered the question underneath it. Readiness on paper and readiness in the body are not the same thing, and no amount of material perception will close that gap, because closing it was never its job.
Symbolic perception is the register most of us reach for next, because it gives us a story, and a story is something we can live inside. We turn the decision into a character study. If it works out, I was brave. If it doesn’t, I was naive. This register feels like wisdom because it has the shape of reflection. But it is retrospective by design. It can only deliver its verdict after the fact, which means in the present moment all it can offer is anxiety dressed as foresight. You cannot get the verdict early. You can only imagine getting it, and the imagining is what keeps you up at night.
I notice it in how people talk to me about the move. Some call it brave. Some, more carefully, call it a big decision, which is what people say when they aren’t sure brave is the right word. I do the same thing internally, auditioning the language I might need afterward. That is the symbolic register at work, and it is exhausting, because it is trying to settle in advance a question that can only be settled in arrears, if it needs settling at all.
Where Viraha Enters
That is where viraha enters.
In the Bhakti tradition, viraha is often translated as separation, or longing, but it is more than sadness. It is the ache that comes from loving something that cannot be possessed or guaranteed. It is the longing that accompanies devotion.
I feel it physically before I can name it. A tightening that is not quite fear and not quite excitement, sitting somewhere behind the sternum, present most mornings now. For a long time I treated that sensation as a problem to manage, something to breathe through or talk myself out of. It took me longer than I would like to admit to consider that it might not be a problem at all. It might simply be what intuitive perception feels like from the inside, before it has been translated into a sentence. I am still learning to identify it when it arrives, but I am increasingly certain it is part of what drives me forward, even before I can say towards what.
I have come to realise that much of my attachment to outcomes has been an attempt to silence that longing, not to understand it.
If I can just work hard enough.
If I can just plan carefully enough.
If I can just nail everything down.
If I can just know how the story ends.
Then perhaps the ache will disappear.
But longing does not disappear. And I no longer think it is supposed to.
Longing is not a symbolic signal asking to be resolved into a verdict. It is an intuitive one. It is the third layer of perception doing exactly what it is built to do: registering that something is shifting, before there is language ready to describe what. The ache is not evidence that I have mistaken hope for wisdom. The ache is the intuitive layer working correctly. It is simply the one we have the least practice trusting, because it never arrives with proof attached.
Longing is not a symbolic signal asking to be resolved into a verdict. It is an intuitive one.
Longing says: I want.
Attachment says: I must have.
Love says: I will walk towards.
There is an enormous difference, and it is a difference of register, not only of feeling. Attachment is a material demand dressed up as devotion. It wants the guarantee, the proof, the certainty before the step. Love, in this sense, is intuitive. It moves on the strength of the pattern it senses, not on the strength of a story about how things will turn out.
I still need a plan. I still need income. I still need to complete what I have started. I still need to be practical. None of that is optional, and none of it is in conflict with what I am describing. Material perception still matters. It is simply not where the real question lives.
Somewhere beneath all my planning was an unspoken bargain with life. If I do everything correctly, then life must reward me. If I am sensible enough, optimistic enough, hardworking enough, then nothing can go wrong. That bargain is a symbolic one. It is the story register trying to do the intuitive layer’s job, and it cannot, because life has never honoured that bargain for anyone.
Reality catches up with everyone. Bodies age. Plans change. Dreams evolve. Projects fail. Relationships end. Circumstances shift. No amount of wisdom prevents us from being human.
And reality has already caught up with me many times. Journalism changed. Businesses changed. Places changed. Identities changed. Dreams changed. What I have called reinvention, each time, has simply been life asking me to participate again.
That is what brought me back to the ledger.
The Second Ledger
For most of my life I have kept one without admitting it. One column for the practical: did the bank balance hold, did the plan survive contact with reality, did everything line up the way a responsible life is supposed to. I have spent most of my big decisions trying to make that column balance before letting myself do anything else.
But there is another column. It doesn’t get audited the way the first one does, so most of us forget we’re keeping it. It records what was learned. What was lived. What was created. What was loved, and who. It isn’t measured in currency, and it doesn’t balance against the first column, because the two were never meant to be reconciled against each other. They simply track different things.
I am not learning to ignore the first column. I still need the plan, the income, the bank balance to hold. What I am learning to let go of is the belief that the first column has to look a certain way before I am allowed to make an entry in the second. That belief, more than any spreadsheet, is what has kept me standing at the edge instead of stepping forward.
Viraha says: I love, therefore I long.
The second ledger says: show me what that longing built.
The second ledger says: show me what that longing built.
Longing and creation. Desire and participation. Hope and what gets made because of it. I no longer think they are opposites. I think they are the same motion, read at two different depths.
The Test I Have Started Applying
Here is the test I have started applying, in place of the one I used to run. Not: will this work out. Not: will I be proven wise or foolish. Instead, I imagine someone else living this exact story. I imagine them saying, I moved to another country at sixty. I tried. I lived. I learned. I created. I loved the experience. And eventually life led me somewhere else.
I do not think that person is foolish. I think they are brave.
If I run the material register on that story, I am checking their bank balance. If I run the symbolic register, I am waiting to find out whether it worked, so I know which word to use: brave or naive. But read intuitively, the verdict was never the point. The walking was. Bravery is not something a story confirms afterward. It is something the walking already contains, the moment it begins.
Bravery is not something a story confirms afterward. It is something the walking already contains, the moment it begins.
I can run the same test backward. I imagine someone who stayed, who looked at the same spreadsheet, felt the same ache, and chose to stay close to family, to a garden they had spent twenty years building, to a life that was already whole. I do not think that person is foolish either. I think they were reading the same intuitive signal and arriving at a different answer, because the pattern they were sensing was their own, not mine. The point was never which choice was correct. The point was whether the choice came from the register built to make it.
This is true whether the threshold is a flight to another country, a business closing, a marriage ending, a diagnosis, a decision to stay when everyone expects you to leave. The specifics change. The three registers do not. Some part of you is checking the logistics, some part is already drafting the story you’ll tell about how it turned out, and some part, quieter than both, is simply registering that something has shifted. That third part is not asking to be overruled by the other two. It is asking to be heard on its own terms.
So as I approach this move, I notice my deepest fear has shifted shape. It is not really that Mexico will not work. It is not even that I might come home one day. The fear was that if things did not unfold as I hoped, I would discover that I had been foolish all along, that my optimism had been misplaced, that I had misunderstood myself.
But I have been asking a symbolic question of an intuitive layer that was never built to answer it. The ache I feel is not a referendum on my judgement. It is proof that something in me is still tracking, still sensing, still alive to what is changing before I have words for it. That is what the third layer of perception is for. Not to deliver verdicts. To keep you oriented towards what is real, while the rest of you catches up.
Mexico does not have to justify itself. The move does not have to prove I was right. My work does not have to become a grand success. Life does not have to reward me for trying.
What Is Being Asked of Me
What is being asked of me is participation. To keep writing. To keep learning. To keep carrying what feels worth carrying. To walk towards what calls me without demanding the guarantee that the symbolic mind keeps asking for, and was never going to receive.
What is being asked of me is participation.
This changes the shape of an ordinary day. A delayed visa stops being evidence the plan was wrong and becomes simply a delay. A friend’s doubt stops requiring a defence and becomes simply their own register speaking, not mine. The ache itself stops being something to resolve before I can move, and becomes the thing telling me I am moving towards something that matters. The practical work doesn’t change. What changes is what I think the ache means while I do it.
At sixty, I no longer need certainty disguised as hope. Hope itself is enough. Not because I know how the story ends, but because I can still hear something calling, and I have learned, finally, to trust that the hearing itself is information.
Somewhere in that second ledger, an entry is already being written, before I have boarded anything, before I know how the story ends. It does not care yet whether it will be called brave or naive. It is simply recording that I moved towards what called me. On its own page, that entry is already complete.
That is the gift hidden inside viraha. The longing never completely leaves, nor should it. It isn’t proof that something is missing. It is proof that the part of you built to sense what matters before you can explain it is still switched on.
In a few weeks, I will board a plane to Mexico. I still don’t know how the story ends. But for the first time, I am no longer asking the wrong layer of myself to tell me.