The Day I Discovered I Had a Clock Up My Ass

A year ago, I honestly thought I had hacked the system. I sold most of my belongings, bought a sailboat, and took off to Southern Europe. It was supposed to be the ultimate escape from our hyper-conditioned society. No more alarm clocks, no more Outlook calendars, no more passive-aggressive emails about deadlines. Just me, the elements, and pure, liquid freedom.

I lasted exactly three weeks.

It happened on a sweltering afternoon somewhere along the Spanish coast. The sea was a perfect mirror. The engine was off. There was literally, factually, absolutely nothing to do. You would think: the ultimate Zen moment. The dream.

I lasted fifteen minutes. Then, a strange physical itch started creeping up from the inside. My right foot began to tap. My hand instinctively reached for a phone that was switched off. My brain started throwing up scenarios at warp speed: Shouldn’t we check the sails? Isn’t it more efficient to scrub the galley right now? What am I actually DOING here?

There I sat, in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, having a borderline panic attack because I had been staring at a cloud for forty-five minutes.

It was a deeply humbling, if not slightly embarrassing, discovery. Sure, I had physically escaped the rat race, but the rat race was still comfortably living inside of me. I had smuggled my own prison guard aboard. It turned out that, without even realizing it, I had developed a deep, spiritual relationship with… my clock. I had become a junkie for linear time. If there was no structure to submit to, I simply didn’t know who I was anymore.

Over the past few months, staring at the water, a very specific image started to form in my mind about how we live our lives. I call it the Riverbank of Parrots versus the River of Melati.

The riverbank is where most of us live. It is a place of absolute chaos and noise. Thousands of brightly colored parrots sitting on top of each other, frantically preening their feathers, and screaming at the top of their lungs just to be heard above the rest. It’s the world of social media, of careers, of the unwritten societal rules: look at me being important, look at me flying! And right next to that chaotic shore flows the river. A silent, calm current filled with Melati — those beautiful, white Indonesian jasmine flowers. They don’t make a sound. They don’t scream for attention. They just drift along with the current, effortlessly spreading their intoxicating scent of pure stillness. In Indonesia, they have a gorgeous phrase for this: Kuasa Diam — the power of silence.

Before that windless afternoon on the boat, I genuinely believed I had left the noisy riverbank behind and was gracefully floating among the jasmine flowers. After all, I had packed my bags. I was ‘spiritually unplugged.’

But as I sat there with my notebook on my lap, frantically scribbling down future article titles, my shoulders tense and my breath shallow, I stopped my pen. I looked around at the glassy water and had to laugh at myself.

I wasn’t on the river at all. I was sitting with my butt stuck in the mud on the riverbank, screeching right along with the rest of the parrots. I had just picked a more tropical backdrop. My own drive to perform, to produce, to ‘be seen’ was so loud that I couldn’t even smell the Melati floating literally around my boat.

That is the funny thing about conditioning: you can move to paradise, but if your inner parrot keeps hijacking the microphone, you just bring the noise with you.

I don’t believe the solution is for everyone to quit their jobs and buy a boat to leave that riverbank. The shore and the river aren’t places on a geographical map. They are choices inside my own head. The question I have to ask myself every single day is simply: which sound am I listening to right now? Do I let myself get swept away by my own terrifying chatter of ‘must, perform, and compare,’ or do I dare to fall silent for a moment, turn off my engine, and just take a breath?

I am nowhere near perfect at this. My inner parrot still gets the microphone way more often than I’d like to admit. But when he starts screeching these days, I just smile, take a deep breath, and look for the scent of jasmine again. Right where I am.