Fall Free

Freedom is not the giving up of control but the recognition that you never had it

“Shiv, two years ago I stepped away from a career that, on paper, looked flawless—steady pay, good colleagues, a clear ladder to climb. I couldn’t ignore a quiet pull toward something truer, so I walked out without a safety net. At first it felt exhilarating. I travelled, wrote, started projects that had only existed in my daydreams. But now the honeymoon is over. The old identity has dissolved, the new one hasn’t arrived, and each morning I wake with the same mix of excitement and dread. Some days I feel like I’m suspended in mid-air—no ground beneath me, no plan to grab onto.

I still know in my bones that leaving was right. Yet I wonder how to stay rooted when nothing familiar remains. I’ve read hints of your own period of profound uncertainty, when even family, finances, and self-definition felt unstable. How did you inhabit that open-ended space without rushing to patch the hole? How do you keep trust alive when life itself feels like an endless freefall?”

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Your life feels like freefall because it is.

As is mine. And everyone else’s on the planet.

The only difference between you and most others - is you are no longer living in denial of the fact.

It is viscerally apparent to you.

We are like skydivers who have jumped out of planes. Each person has a backpack on labelled “life skills” - and they’ve somehow convinced themselves that it contains a parachute.

There is no parachute.

This journey ends in only one way for every jumper.

What we call “society” is a network of skydivers linking arms with one another in intricate patterns as they all freefall together. While this may provide a certain sense of ‘safety in numbers’ - the outcome they are all headed for remains unchanged.

If you doubt this - take a look at the current state of your nation’s political landscape. Does it not feel like freefall to you?

And as a species that is on the brink of all manner of catastrophic outcomes - be it the fast approaching singularity of AI, imminent ecological collapse, the growing redundancy of governments and the shifting concentration of global wealth - does this not all feel like freefall to you?

But this is nothing new. It has always been this way.

The history of civilization is nothing more than a chronicle of the evolving systems of denial we have invented to avoid this fact.

It is not just humans that are in freefall. Everything in this universe is.

When I studied physics in high school I was fascinated by how satellites orbit the Earth. They don’t actually move in predetermined circular paths around the Earth - like a motorized toy car driving in circles around some point.

Instead, they are perpetually falling towards the earth. And as they fall, the Earth is simultaneously rotating away in such a way that the satellite never manages to reach it. The resulting effect of the falling satellite and the Earth curving away from it - is the orbiting pattern the satellite makes around it (here is a short clip that explains this phenomenon).

This isn’t true only for satellites.

It is true of all orbiting celestial bodies.

This means the Earth, and other planets, are perpetually falling towards the Sun.

Yet, the Sun is also perpetually falling towards the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

And the Milky Way, in turn, is perpetually falling towards Sagittarius A - a supermassive black hole with a mass 4 million times greater than that of the Sun.

So, understand that it’s not just you who is in freefall.

All of reality as we can perceive it is.

The only open question that remains is: when will that freefall end?

For the human species, it could be a million years - or much sooner if any of the catastrophic scenarios I had mentioned plays out. For the Earth, it could be five billion years, for the sun not much longer than that. And there will come a time when the Milky Way too will sing its own swan song. (This reminds me of one of my favorite Enigma tracks: Goodbye Milky Way. Have a listen.).

Returning to the analogy of the skydivers: just because you have chosen to break away from the patterned mass of others who are all falling with arms linked together - and have instead chosen to freefall in solitude - does not mean you are unsafe. Or any less safe than they are. Their safety is an illusion. Their sense of security is a coping mechanism which helps them avoid the stark inevitability of their fate.

Not all who freefall - fall freely.

This is the most essential matter of all.

Can one live in a manner that does not require delusion as a means for coping with reality?

Can one live in a manner that admits to the absurdity and the inevitability of one’s fate - yet finds joy in living anyway?

Can one see that one is falling and find freedom in that fall - rather than seeking a freedom from it?

These are the kinds of questions very few ever ponder.

For freedom does not come from transcending the limits of reality. But from seeing reality for what it is without cowering from it.

Two years ago, I went through a very similar period of professional, financial and even existential uncertainty - as you are aware. The very foundations of my life were tested during this time - my family’s financial survival, my children’s well-being, the continuity of my marriage, my own mental health. It was a darkness of unfathomable density. Where each day became utterly unpredictable. My own perception became unreliable to me. I swung from wild extremes of emotion, desire, fear, and apathy. I was unrecognizable to myself from one hour to the next.

This was not just freefall but a dizzying tailspin.

And what I came to realize was even the most beautiful things in the world, even the most profound forms of love, even the most enduring relationships and the most resilient enterprises - all contain within them the seed of collapse, waiting to sprout at any moment.

The collapse isn’t a bug. It is a feature.

The collapse is not a sign of failure. It is an inevitability.

And we may resist it because we crave continuance - for the things we love to endure. But eventually we come to see that such resistance is futile.

In the midst of a collapsing mind and a collapsing life - I found freedom.

And that freedom did not arrive in the form of a solution to that collapse. Rather it came in the form of a perspective shift that realized:

In order for things to collapse they have to first exist. And this very fact of their existence is a miracle.

Imagine if you were hungry and someone were to, by the simple wave of a hand, conjure a loaf of bread for you to eat. Is that not a miracle?

But now imagine that instead of marveling at how that loaf of bread simply materialized into your hands, you instead became fixated on how long that bread would feed you, or how hungry you will be once you have consumed it, and how you might eventually starve.

The miracle is lost. And fear now occupies the seat of power in your mind.

Now I ask you: Is your own life any different from that loaf of bread?

Do you know how you came to materialize into this reality? Do you know how you have this incredible body, this powerful mind, this vast heart capable of such depth of feeling?

Yet, how many of us are truly able to perceive the miracle that our own lifetimes are? How many instead become lost in the minutiae of trying to figure out how to keep the miracle going - until the miracle no longer feels like a miracle and instead seems a great burden?

Living is falling.

Falling isn’t a choice. It is an inevitability.

The only choice open to any of us is:

Fall scared or fall free.

There came a point in my process when the fear that was causing me to tailspin gradually gave way to a feeling of profound sacredness. Nothing in my external circumstance changed for a while. Yet, internally everything did.

It began to feel like my whole life, my sense of self, my personality, my relationships - were all orbiting some unseen gravitational force more powerful than any of them.

Being.

Rather than resist the pull - I gave into it.

And instead of becoming smashed into a million pieces like I had feared I would - falling began to feel like orbiting. A profound dance between the body-mind and being itself. Where as one fell, the other curved away in perfect synchronization.

Today, I no longer orient myself by the network of other skydivers. Social expectations, values, meaning and morals have no influence over me. My only reason for complying with them is to remain functionally relevant to my brethren.

I orient to one power and one power alone. The gravitational pull of being that is at my core. Towards which I am freefalling inexorably.

That luminous void that gave me life - and into which I will inevitably collapse.