HOW I CAME TO WRITE WHAT I WRITE.
A reflection on listening, survival, and remembering
A reflection on listening, survival, and remembering
It did not arrive as information.
It arrived as necessity.
Much of what I write was learned before it had words—learned in moments when understanding was the only way to survive. When the world was not safe, attention became precise. When love was uncertain, listening became deep. When ordinary explanations failed, awareness widened.
There were years when I lived closer to the invisible than the visible. Not as an escape, but as a refuge. Imagination, myth, and silence were not fantasies; they were places of coherence when the outer world felt unbearable. Over time, those inner landscapes taught me pattern and rhythm, beginning and ending held all at once, and revealed that healing does not move in straight lines.
Later came embodiment—a long, patient return to the body. Breath by breath. Grief by grief. Learning to stand on the earth without armor. Learning that presence is not transcendence, but arrival: into sensation, into limitation, into love that can be felt rather than imagined.
I did not study wisdom as a discipline. I was shaped by listening. By sitting with suffering without trying to fix it. By being with people at thresholds—illness, loss, death—where pretense cannot survive. In those places, something honest speaks. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But unmistakably.
What I offer is not teaching in the conventional sense. It is remembering aloud. It is naming what becomes obvious when we stop rushing past ourselves. The words come from long attention, from failure, from tenderness, from silence that has been kept company rather than feared.
If there is authority here, it is not personal. It belongs to what emerges when life is met fully—when pain is allowed to instruct, when love is not defended against, when presence is trusted more than explanation.
That is how I know what I write.
Not because I sought wisdom, but because life asked me to listen,
and I did.
I did not find the willingness to listen because I was wise. I found it because the alternatives failed.
There came a point when distraction no longer worked, when explanation no longer soothed, when effort only deepened the ache. The strategies that once protected me began to cost more than they gave. Something in me knew—without language—that continuing as I was would mean abandoning something essential.
Listening became the only honest option left.
At first it was not noble. It was born of exhaustion, of grief, of reaching the end of endurance. But within that stopping, something unexpected happened: the noise thinned. What I had been running from did not attack me. It waited.
Remembering did not arrive as revelation.It arrived as relief.
Relief from the effort of holding myself together. Relief from constant vigilance. Relief from the belief that I had to become something else in order to be whole.
The willingness grew slowly, the way trust grows with an animal that has known harm. A little at a time. Breath by breath. I listened because not listening hurt more.
And in that listening, memory returned—not as images or stories, but as a felt sense. A recognition. A quiet knowing that what I was seeking had never left, only fallen out of reach when life demanded that I survive.
I did not remember by looking backward. I remembered by staying. By remaining with what was present long enough for it to soften. By allowing silence to be a companion rather than a void. By discovering that what waited beneath fear was not danger, but care.
That is how the willingness came. Not through effort, but through surrender to what was already here, patiently waiting for me to stop running.
Nigel Lott
teaandzen.org
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