The Book of Alchemy: A Creative Practice for an Inspired Life

by Suleika Jaouad

taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

My modus operandi became this: to trust and find ways to delight in the mystery of how things unfold, even if it’s not what you had planned, even if it’s far from ideal, and to believe that facing the thing you fear brings you exactly what you need. In my journal I wrote: It is possible to alter the course of my becoming.

It provides tools to engage with discomfort, to peel back the layers, to uncover your truest, most laid-bare self—and in doing so, to distill kernels of insight, to dream daringly, to learn to hold the brutal and the beautiful facts of life in the same palm.

I was not, of course, fine. Are most of us? When we’re regularly chugging from a firehose of human suffering on all of our screens and involuntarily taking extra servings of stress and responsibility even though our plates are plenty full?

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not,” Joan Didion wrote in her iconic essay “On Keeping a Notebook.” “Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”

How then do we encapsulate the memory in a way that also preserves its transitory nature?

And when you’re in that kind of spiral, another fear creeps in: the fear that you’ll never figure it out, that you’ll never feel better, that you’ll never experience uncomplicated joy again.

I started spiraling, wondering how exactly I’d made my life so overdetermined yet under-considered, how I’d managed to use my considerable freedom so poorly, how I’d tried so hard to make use of myself as a human that I’d left myself with a minimum of time to feel human in any meaningful way.

We live in a world of sensory overload, bombarded with more images than we could ever fully process. As a result, we choose to see the things we know and can relate to. Our ability to break through existing patterns of recognition to see new things is thwarted by our deep, instinctive craving for certainty.

Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

Every time I moved, I had to rearrange my inner furniture to make sense of my new surroundings.

Many of the most compassionate and accomplished people I know still struggle with the belief that they are fundamentally bad and wrong.

While meditating this morning, I prayed for the long string of goodbyes I’ve asked my body to absorb: the ones that weren’t quick; the ones where words weren’t compulsory, or needed more language, more clarity, more feeling; the ones that should have happened but didn’t; the ones that did but the heaviness multiplied in their lacking.

Consider all the unknown possibilities for joy. What will thrill you? What might you love that you don’t even know about yet?

If we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at far greater risk of one day fatefully snapping.

Maybe I will never get there; maybe “there” doesn’t even exist. But the goal is simply to figure out how to thrive here.

What funny little demon creatures our own egos are! Just like health problems, money problems, love problems, violence, or death, bad choices and mistakes come for all of us; it doesn’t matter who you think you are.

Then, one of the men, the one who had “saved” me, said, “We take turns fucking up. We take turns getting it right. That’s just how it goes, I guess.”

But I love the thought that, if we really want to know the true nature of our talent, we could just apply it to…anything. Something random, something that comes from outside of ourselves and is therefore untainted with intention.

When looking back, a life tells a story. The chain of days string together into a narrative shaped by choices we make at pivotal moments, some large, some small.

You gave me so much love for forty-six years that it has fueled my recovery from the loss of your companionship.