Dear World: You Were Born to Be a Lightning Rod

I’m Ash, and I’m a writer, traveler, nonconformist & nomad, and every week I’m sharing funny field notes from around the world. Currently, I’m in America writing about what it’s been like to return home to my small town, twenty years after living abroad.

There comes a day when you have to decide:

How much do I want money, and how much do I want peace?

Because, let’s be real: there are a lot of things you could do for money. People who do pet cremation, for example. Or hood vent cleaning for restaurants. Or porta potty servicing (the oldest and strongest of all the warriors).

Sometimes I think about the people who have businesses manufacturing wood pallets. Like, who are these heroes? Are they passionate about it? And what about the people who rent out party tents? One day someone woke up and was like, you know what? I’m gonna buy CANOPY INFRASTRUCTURE. AND I’M GONNA SELL THIS FUCKING SHIT. (And that’s when capitalism looked down and whispered: ‘Rise, my child.’)

There are a lot of online jobs that are the equivalent of “Party Tent Rental Peter.” Like people who organize Google Drive Files for a living. Or clean up people’s CRMs. Or do spreadsheet consulting. Not that we don’t need those things—can someone please come organize my Google Drive Files?!—but I often wonder: how much do they really, really love what they do? Like, deep in their LOINS.

Which brings up the next question:

Is loving what you do necessary?

There are lots of examples that prove that it’s not. Lots of people who are happy to show up, punch in, do the thing, and punch out. God, do I admire them. I do. There’s a real freedom in being unattached to your work. This is a superpower.

Imagine not needing your career to save you?
To represent you?
To be a proxy of your personality?

IMAGINE NEVER HAVING AN EXISTENTIAL IDENTITY CRISIS?

Looooolllllllll.

Raise your hand if you can relate to the “existential identity crisis.” Raise your hand if you’ve been flip-flopping back and forth between ideas. (For the last 4 years.) Raise your hand if you’re feeling pulled toward something new, but keep hesitating because…money? Cachet? Logistics? Transitions? And, will you still be able to afford Pottery Barn curtain rods?

This, my friends, is my tribe.

The ‘I Have 47 Passions and a Ticket to Portugal’ People.

Not because you are flighty and fidgety and restless: but because you are so involved with life, that life keeps showing you new ways to live it. To experience it. To be seduced by it. To create with it.

What if the reason you take your work so personally is because you take your life so personally?

Because you are a person who is really fucking HERE; a person who is not checked out; a person who sees the world like a buffet of 77 types of mac and cheese; a person who sees possibility around every corner; a person who collects rich, meaningful experiences as if they are basic human needs; a person who is emotional about things like beauty, and artistry, and history, and connection; a person who cannot untether themselves from every live current coursing through the plains, the mountains, the fjords, the cities and streets built by fellow men.

It’s the mega-watt voltage of being alive on this spinning planet.

And, some of us were born to be lightning rods.

***

Lightning rods cannot shrink themselves—or else they wouldn’t be able to do what they were built to do: let the universe blast straight through you.

Every experience. Every emotion. Every nanometer of life.

You were made to throw fireballs.

Which means something critical:

Lightning rods don’t find peace by hiding.
And, they don’t find money that way, either.

It is not their nature.

Your job is to charge forward and stand tall and lay it all on the line and dare the world to come at you. Your job is to be the guinea pig; the test dummy; the one that other people look to as a compass—because you have the wisdom that living 1,000 lives has brought.

So here’s the truth no one tells the lightning rods:

You are never going to find peace by trying to be smaller.
You’re never going to find clarity by dimming.
You’re never going to find direction by pretending you’re built like everyone else.

You only find it by doing the thing you were designed for:

Standing tall.
Letting the universe plug itself directly into your ribcage.
And channeling the charge into something only you could make.

Because while other people were born to keep the lights steady,
you were born to light the sky.

And the moment you stop hiding from that —
the moment you stop trying to negotiate with your own electricity —
is the moment everything starts lining up.
The money.
The peace.
The purpose.
The path.

Not because you forced it.
But because you finally stopped fighting your nature.

You were built to carry more voltage than most people ever touch.
You were built to turn that voltage into something beautiful.
You were not built to fill out HR paperwork at 3 p.m. on a Tuesday.

(Even if it’s at a party tent rental company.)