Still Looking

It keeps happening.

Someone arrives with a problem. We talk. They leave with something - I’m not always sure what. But they come back. And then they bring someone else.

Over the years this has repeated across ages, professions, cities. A 22-year-old figuring out her first job. A 45-year-old stuck in a partnership that stopped working. A colleague who needed someone to help him see what he already knew. None of them in my domain. None of them situations where I had formal standing to say anything.

I engaged anyway. And somehow, I became an anchor for them.

The weight of that is real. Each conversation pulls from the same reserve. There’s no clean separation between one person’s crisis and the next. You carry it. Sometimes without realizing it. The energy drain is not small. And yet - I never stopped. Not once did I say, enough.

That kept me wondering.

For a long time I told myself it was selflessness. I have no skin in the game. Their career outcome isn’t mine. Their marriage isn’t mine. Their company isn’t mine. When the result doesn’t belong to you, the advice flows clean. No agenda. No fear of being wrong. Just what you see, said plainly.

That’s easy to give. But lately I’ve been sitting with a more uncomfortable question.

Is that really all it is? Because here’s what I’ve also noticed. There’s something that happens when the advice lands. When someone looks at you and the fog clears in their eyes. When they say - yes, that’s it. Something in me responds to that. It’s quiet. It doesn’t ask for recognition. But it’s there.

So am I selfless? Or do I just not need public credit while still needing to feel that I made sense to someone? That I was useful? That the thinking landed?
I genuinely don’t know.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because I’ve spent years helping others find clarity. Watching people arrive scattered and leave with a thread to follow. But my own anchor - what grounds me, what I’m building toward, what I’m here for beyond the roles I hold - that remains, even now, not fully found.

I’m still looking. Maybe that’s the connection I never saw clearly before. The giving and the searching are the same movement. When you haven’t found your own center, you locate yourself through others. Their questions become mirrors. Their confusion gives you something to work with. And in helping them focus, in getting them unstuck faster, in catching the error before it becomes permanent - maybe you’re also trying to understand yourself. What you value. How you think. What you actually believe.

The Ashtavakra Gita says - you are not the actor. The one who believes he acts is bound by it. The one who knows he is the witness is already free.

I come back to this. Not as an answer. As a frame to sit with.

What if I’m not the one giving? What if I’m the observer - watching something move through the conversation, through the space between two people, and mistaking it for mine? The insight, the question that unlocks something, the quiet that settles after a good exchange - what if none of that originates in me?
I don’t own the outcome. I don’t carry the consequences. I don’t even fully understand my own motive.

Maybe I’m not the anchor at all. Maybe I’m just a pause - a moment of stillness - where someone else finds enough quiet to hear themselves.

Thehrav.

Not a destination. Not a role. Just a quality of presence that allows something to land.

And if that’s true, then the searching is also okay. You don’t need to find your anchor before you can be useful to someone else. The searching itself, done consciously - done as a witness rather than a doer - is its own kind of ground.
I still don’t have the full answer. The pattern continues. People keep coming. I keep showing up.

But I’m watching it more carefully now. Not to judge it. Not to fix it. Just to see it clearly. That’s the only thing I know how to do.