What Is Beyond?

I have always been a hypersensitive person—not only emotionally, but almost literally through my senses. I hear faint sounds, notice small visual differences, and can taste when an ingredient has changed.

At home, a smell from the kitchen can wake me in the middle of the night. Maybe the trash has not been taken out. If the exhaust fan is off while I am sitting in the living room, I notice almost immediately.

Please turn on the exhaust fan.

That sensitivity seems to extend beyond my senses. I notice patterns, and once I notice something, my mind naturally asks:

Is that really it? What is beyond that?

Always Looking Beyond

That question has driven much of my life.

In business: Is this really the best we can do? What else is possible?

With success, freedom and happiness: What comes after this?

Even with my wife, I wondered what existed beyond falling in love. We became boyfriend and girlfriend, and naturally marriage became the destination. Then we got married.

But soon my mind asked again: Is that it? We sleep together, wake up together, eat together and live together. What is beyond this?

So we explored. We travelled. We tried things together. Good things, bad things, ordinary things. We wanted to experience what life had to offer.

I don't think there was anything wrong with that curiosity.

But I was almost always looking beyond where I already was.

I Have Been to Beyond

Then illness took me somewhere I had never intended to explore.

For weeks, my world became a hospital bed, then an easy chair. There were days when I couldn't go to the toilet myself. I ate in bed. I urinated in bed. I could barely look at a phone.

I was a man in my thirties experiencing something closer to how I had imagined the final years of life might feel.

And somewhere during those months, a strange thought came to me:

I have been to beyond.

If I am fortunate, I may achieve many of the things I want in my forties, fifties, sixties and seventies. There can always be another achievement, another experience, another destination.

But if I keep asking what lies beyond all of them, eventually life has an answer.

Growing old. Getting sick. Feeling pain.

And finally, death.

Not because something went wrong. Simply because I was born.

There Is Nothing Beyond Now

That realization does not make me want less life.

It makes this part of life feel more valuable.

Marcus Aurelius reflected that whether we live for an extraordinarily long time or only a short one, we cannot lose the past or the future because neither belongs to us. What we eventually lose is only the present moment—the only part of life we ever actually possess.

For most of my life, I kept asking:

What is beyond this?

Now I have seen a little of what is beyond.

And there is nothing there that makes me want to rush through here.

Maybe this moment does not need to lead anywhere else before it becomes enough.

Shaped from my audio journals with the help of an AI assistant.