I talked to my father this morning. It doesn't happen often and at this point I think I figured out it's nobody's fault anymore. I just like to listen as he gets excited by his own ideas. Despite the distance, we very much hold the same thoughts and express them with a similar type of energy.

He doesn't read me but he knows I write. He asked what form of writing I preferred. Essays? Manifestos? Novels? His eyes lit up when I told him that actually, I was writing nothing but journal entries recently. It's funny how life can be blunt sometimes. "I couldn't be happier, son." I mean, the man doesn't read it, what difference does it make what I write?

He told me it didn't matter what I did but he also said this : "I'm happy you understood that your life is already a story." He carried on: "Not that there's anything wrong with fiction but kid, it's already crazy enough that we're here. How many of us take the time, sit back and assess that this life is weird. Most of us are looking for a story to tell, completely oblivious to the fact that you'll probably never be able to tell a story that's more real than yours."

There was a silence after that. So no other story is worth telling?

"It's not like that, man. See it that way : So much had to happen in order for you to even exist. Everything had to align in the most perfect of manners for you not only to be born, but for you to also be molded into the man you are today. It had to be the right environment. It had to be the right events in the precise order they happened in for you to think the way that you do. We are born as blank slates. You'd be different had it not been for your friends, your fears and the challenges that were personal to you. You are, in other words the art that you seek outside of yourself. You are unique in more ways than you could comprehend. So your journal, it's not something to be taken lightly, as a self-absorbed exercise; you are showing awareness that no one else could be you and that's something to be celebrated. Trillions of happenings turned a part of the Universe into you, it wouldn't have happened if not deliberately and now that you're aware of it, you become the mirror God looks into."

Dad? What the fuck? I bursted out laughing. I had him tell me again. Then I saw it. We think we are our bodies, we believe we are our minds but in reality, we are the sum of all the conditions that make our existence a possibility. We are, in other words, phenomena of this plane of reality, we are one with the whole shebang. Now, what it means is quite simple. The Universe doesn't second-guess itself. Seeds in the ground do not improve; they grow. The sun does not ask to be turned into life; it shines. The stream of the Ocean does not ask for permission, it flows. And yet, here we are, pondering what's it about us that makes us special. Bitch, please. The sole fact of you being here is what's special about you. You get to tell the Whole of the Universe what it feels like to be you. No one else can do that. Do yo get that? Be part of the current. Move with all that is else until all that is else is all that is you. Understand that there will be no time where you feel more like You. That's it. That's the show. That's you. What are you going to do about it?

Way I see it, we can either embrace what feels natural, what feels like we should be doing or we can let other people with the same insecurities as us lead us towards what would make them feel comfortable. Yet, it's not many people who are genuinely happy to see you flourish. It's not a lot of them who can draw the line between your success and their inadequacies. So you might live your life filling the gaps between versions of you. Some days I can almost see this ravine between who I am now and who I know I should be. What my father did today is nothing short of mind-warping.

He made me see this : If you can't see the best version of you, it's because you went ahead and chased something that stayed behind.