You were born somewhere in this world, into some family, under some conditions. You had no choice in any of it — whether to be born, which family, which circumstances. Nobody asked you. You are here now. And you grew up completely unaware of why you were born, what you are, who you are, and what this world even is or why it exists.

Society did its work. You were shaped by everything around you. You developed desires, dreams, fears, and purposes. You fell in love, felt hate, burned with jealousy, collapsed into sadness, rose into happiness. You cried. You raged. You laughed until it hurt. You went through all of it without ever choosing any of it, and without ever truly understanding what was happening to you or why. It just happened.

You don't know why you feel what you feel. You cannot control it, because your emotions are tied to life events you didn't choose, which in turn are tied to desires you didn't truly author, which were influenced by people and places and experiences handed to you.

People are born into different ages, different countries, different religions, different social circles, different life circumstances entirely. No one chooses where they start. Yet we label each other as successful, failure, good, bad etc, as if it was purely them.

You have lived your whole life like this. Doing things without knowing why you are really doing them. Wanting things without knowing where the wanting is coming from. Never questioning. Not because you are stupid, but because you were never once encouraged to stop and ask. And forget about being encouraged, we all are so deeply consumed by this society, this material world, that it becomes a trance. A collective trance so total that nobody stops, nobody wonders. Nobody asks what is beyond all this? Is this really how we are supposed to live? Why can't we seem to live without suffering?

And one day, you will die. Without choice, as you were born. You had no choice in being born. You have no choice in dying. So do you have any choice in what happens between the two?

And everything you spent your life chasing, the desires, the dreams, the fears, the purposes will dissolve. Because they were never really yours. They were given to you, built into you. You simply lived them out, mistaking them for yourself.

Something is broken.

But here is the contradiction.

Whatever this is, god or whatever, it has given us at least one freedom. The one thing that was always there.

The freedom to stop.

To breathe. To observe. To ask, why do I behave the way I do? What are the patterns repeating in my life and in my surroundings? Where did this feeling come from? Is this really how I am supposed to live?

Maybe the suffering is not proof that something is wrong with you. Maybe it is proof that you have been living on the surface of yourself your whole life, never once going deeper. That one act of stopping, observing, questioning, is the beginning of something. Nobody can hand it to you. It was the one thing that was always yours.

The great yogis, saints and enlightened beings across traditions have pointed at this for thousands of years. Advaita Vedanta, one of the oldest schools of Hindu philosophy, gave us an analogy of the dusty mirror. The truth of life is like a mirror covered in dust. The true reflection is right there. It was always there. But the dust settled over time of the conditioning, the unchosen desires, the labels, the trance, and slowly distorted everything until you could no longer see clearly.

The truth was never something to find or acquire. It was never somewhere else. It is something to be realised. Experienced. Uncovered.

You were never broken. You were never lost.

You just couldn't see yourself through all that dust.

And now, maybe, you can begin to wipe it away.

I don't know what this "truth" is, but I want to.