On joining the rhythms of the world
A few days ago, a former colleague at IVP, the venture capital fund where I used to work, asked me how to practically apply some of the learnings I mentioned in a previous essay.
#### All I want for my birthday is another shot at life
Louise Ireland·September 18, 2025Read full story](https://louiseireland.substack.com/p/all-i-want-for-my-birthday-is-another)
He asked how I’m thinking about my own goals, time, and future planning while living in the moment, and how those who aren’t suffering from life-threatening diseases could do the same.
I gave him an off-hand answer about working in energy rhythms rather than focusing on goals, but the question stayed with me. It lingers in the same place as the nagging narrative questioning how I’ll spend my time when I feel well goes. I know my work right now is to heal, yet old habits of striving die hard. There is the nihilistic view, that none of this matters and we’re all going to die, but despite that, I find myself grasping for ways to make an impact while I am here, wishing there were more hours in the day.
My body has forced me to listen to it, to listen to its rhythms in a way I may have ignored if I were healthier. In that space where the veil thins between life and death, I’ve come to see the structure of the world as fundamentally different than what I once believed.
Years ago, a physicist friend gave me an impromptu lesson in string theory. “None of this is actually solid,” he said laughing, while tossing back a tequila, “I theoretically could put my hand through you but I can’t because my atoms and yours are excitations of similar quantum fields. The vibrational harmony and electromagnetic repulsion between us prevents this.” Quantum physics is often misused by spirituality circles, and I don’t wish to add to that confusion, but I think about his words often.
If nothing is solid, if matter is vibration, then what exactly separates life from death? Beginnings from endings? To quote the flesh-eating zombie in It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over , “Every live thing is the history and future of all dead things. Every dead thing is the future of all live things.” There is a world beyond our comprehension, beyond what we can see in our Flatland scope of the universe. The podcast The Telepathy Tapes gestures towards this too.
How much can we hear when we stop talking and begin to listen?
I don’t pretend to have any answers. But by fault of my own human need to solve puzzles, that question haunts me, and I deeply want to be able to answer it. What I’ve circled for the last few months is not a rejection of ambition or capitalism or the world at large. I do not believe the key to happiness is to throw it all away, to spend it all, to do nothing, but rather to live in accordance with one’s core values, allowing one’s essence to permeate the world in a way that aligns with its larger rhythm.
Who are you at your deepest level? The you that existed before you were defined by the world? Before disapproval or praise shaped you. Camus wrote that, “a person’s work is nothing but the slow trek to discover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence their heart first opened.” What does your essence look like? What does it smell like? Taste like? Or, as I’ve written about before, if you were a couch, what couch would you be? There are no right answers, only the truth of what feels like you.
Me as a couch
#### On friendship & couches
April 17, 2024Read full story](https://louiseireland.substack.com/p/on-friendship)
When you build your inner world, you begin to understand the forces that move you. Values, as I see them, are not fixed inscriptions on a corporate wall but rather living systems, dynamic and cyclical. They are what give your world motion.
So, how do you do this?
Gather what feels like you, the random photos from your favorites folder that aren’t of anything in particular but make you smile, the music to which you keep returning, the food that makes you feel like you. What adjectives come to mind when you think about these things? What feelings arise? What patterns emerge? What qualities? What makes you feel most alive?
My values form a living, cyclical system animated by the continuous dance between my Yin, my core value of softness, and my Yang, my core value of Growth. The meeting point of these is my deepest value of Love. You could also view this as what elevates me, what roots me, and the tree trunk connecting the two, my Value Tree, if you will.
My Value Tree
When I first created my Value Tree, it became clear where I was out of alignment and where I was spending energy on people and pursuits that did not nourish me. I began reviewing my actions weekly, noticing where I had overexpressed yang or yin, and focusing on my return to equilibrium.
A life without purpose exhausts itself; a life with vision renews.
If this feels abstract, let me use the four questions favored by tribal elders to guide you back to the moment when you were last completely yourself:
* When did you stop dancing? - embodying joy and letting energy flow?
* When did you stop singing? - using your voice freely
* When did you stop being enchanted by stories? - leaving behind your imagination
* When did you stop being comforted by the sweet territory of silence? - listening to the deepest depths of yourself
How do you practically fit this all into a day-to-day life?
I believe it comes from recognizing that your life has seasons, your day has rhythms. In The Inevitable, a book foundational to my worldview, Kevin Kelly writes how certain forces are already in motion. We cannot stop them, we can only learn how to ride them. I practice this in ocean-swimming, of letting my body be carried by the currents and the waves, and recently, I practiced it at a 5Rhythms workshop at Esalen. There are five rhythms of dance that make up our lives, that make up our world: flow, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness. Traditional planning resembles only staccato in its precise efficiency, but life asks us to move through all five.
A wave gathers energy in flow, hits a point of definition and precision in staccato, dissolves, breaking apart its form chaotically, lyrically re-emerges in the foam on the sand, and quietly integrates in stillness. Living aligned requires the same attention, the discipline of awareness rather than control. Is it time to define, to dissolve, to play, to pause? One rhythm cannot exist without each other.
You look to the rhythms of the world and you listen for the rhythms within yourself. There is a time for everything. We are meant to wake with the sun, to tell our systems to rise with light, to eat at regular intervals. There is a pulse within us that drives creation, that insists on recalibration, that demands release. You structure your day around your core values, and in doing so, you move with what is already alive in the world.
We can debate predetermination and free will endlessly, but I have come to believe this: we cannot will something into being unless the world also wants it to exist.
It helps me to remember that I am merely a guest in this world, not the host, that I have not set the meal or the agenda, I am making the most of the dinner and the other guests who have come to join. Rumi called being human a guest house, every emotion a visitor. I’ve learned that even sorrow, when welcomed, rearranges the furniture of the soul.
To answer the question, my goal is not to master the rhythm of the world, but to join it. To recognize that I am not a swimmer in the ocean of life, but rather, the water itself, carried by the same current that carries everything else. To quote my favorite words from Carlo Rovelli, “The best grammar for thinking about the world is that of change, not of permanence. Not of being, but of becoming.”
In East of Eden, Cal comes to understand that goodness is not perfection, but the willingness to begin again after failure. I return to that truth often. To be good is to stay in motion with the world, to let yourself be changed by it, to respond rather than to resist.
Now that I no longer have to be perfect, I can just be good.
I believe deeply that you are what you surround yourself with. At the risk of being ‘yet another newsletter’, I wanted to share some of the things that are currently floating in my sphere of consciousness lately, that are helping me live now, starting with several of the things I referenced. Please let me know in the comments what you would like more (or less) of! I would love feedback. I also love see people’s couches / value trees so please send along if this resonated with you. Please share, repost, or heart this if deserved. It helps me get discovered and reach more people.
