As the oak sleeps.

As the oak sleeps in the acorn, a king sleeps inside you. 

You feel it—your highest Self—stirring. Shuffling like a ghoul in its grave, you experience it as a restlessness you cannot place. Yet still, it persists. Gnawing at the back of your brain with a message. 

What, you wonder, is that message? I can’t answer that for you. But for me, the anxiousness of my spirit seems to be a function of the extent to which I have estranged myself from the person I have it within myself to be, and the extent to which I have resisted or refused to go where I feel called. 

As if the uneasiness is a result of carrying a caged soul that longs to be reunited with the divine source from which it was drawn. And the only way to settle such a spirit is to live a life of ascension toward the ideal that shows it that it’s on its way home. 

The antidote, then, is to go the way of what Abraham Maslow called Self-Actualization. To realize, as Maslow put it, “what you can be, you must be,” and commit to closing to gap between who you are and who you might be. 

And who might you be? Religions and philosophies hint at it with their descriptions of the ideal. Myths gesture at it with their heroes. Together, they paint this picture of who we might be—the latest avatar of all those great leaders and legends of the past. 

Together, they give us the playbook for Self-Actualization. As Ben Franklin put it, “[i]mitate Jesus and Socrates” and live in line with their examples of love and truth-telling, as best you can. 

Follow the way of the hero and take the hard path—the one that forces you out into the unknown where you’ll have to face your fear—as often as possible. Because in doing so you’ll put yourself in situations where the heroic pieces of you are forced to respond. 

By mimicking those we admire in our everyday action, we slowly become an amalgamation of the best that man or woman has it within them to be. We annex potential to being. And as our soul stretches outward, we “mold ourselves in kinship to thy God,” and satiate our spirit.

So the next time you feel restlessness rise, remember it’s the rumblings of the king you bury that wants to awaken. All I ask is you let it.