Price Of Internal Clarity

What is having internal clarity, i.e. clarity of thought with regard to yourself?

Clarity. I define it as taking a step back and looking at your life on each major vertical of it (friendships and relationships, career, financial goals, etc.) and having a clear idea of what you want (a goal perhaps), and asking yourself:

• If you are moving towards the right direction
• How far you are to that goal
• Or, being clear with yourself that on certain verticals you don't know what you want and you are okay with it. Or, you are okay with just knowing you are moving in the right direction. After all, in many aspects of like the journey is the goal.

The consequence of having internal clarity should be that on day to day, you would have less doubt on why you are doing something that you are doing.

Internal^[1] . Gaining clarity about external subjects can often be found through (directed) action: You research the subject, or ask around. It is intuitive in that there is something you don't know, and you find the answer by doing something. Taking some action.

Internal clarity is different, and while I believe some amount of action (e.g. journaling and research) is useful, it is not at all sufficient. Internal clarity, especially for the busy modern individual, requires inaction. It requires doing nothing, and letting the busy day-to-day mind calm down, only for you to then observe what has always been there, but buried under many layers of obfuscation.

Internal clarity often boils down to emotional questions to which we look for an answer. But it is not a math problem to be solved, but rather the answer is already written on a big bold plate ready to be understood, except it is invisible behind a thick layer of (mental) fog, and the only way to push that fog away is time and inaction.

This is why I am an advocate of the Vipassana meditation retreat, and I think anyone resonating with the above^[2] mindset should consider doing at least one 10-day course. 10-days is a small price to pay in return for finally seeing what is going on in your head.

There is one class of action that I have not mentioned above, and I do think it helps with internal clarity. That is, actions that lead to profoundness. These are often somewhat extreme unplanned events that kick you out of your comfort zone such that it causes a lot of turbulence in your head. And out of turbulence, the fog moves away and you might get clarity about certain topics. I will let this meme explain it better than I can:

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