Back to Rashad

I’ve spent a good portion of my life remembering where I come from. The streets, the train stations, the people, the sounds. The things that shaped me before I was old enough to understand what they meant. I’ve written about home, about family, about memory, and about the strange ways a place can remain inside you long after you’ve left it.

But lately I’ve been questioning what it means to remember.

I can write about the past until every detail feels alive again. I can revisit the places that raised me and tell stories about the people who made me who I am. But memory isn’t presence. And nostalgia, no matter how beautiful, doesn’t replace the responsibility of being here.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life simply remembering the people I love. I want to be there for them. My sons. My family. The people who have stood beside me through the years. And perhaps most importantly, I want to learn how to be there for myself.

I want to return to Rashad.

Not the younger man before the mistakes, relationships, losses, and years that changed the way I see the world. I have no interest in pretending those things didn’t happen. They belong to me. Every experience, every contradiction, every version of myself I thought I’d outgrown.

But I no longer want to confuse survival with living.

I’m forty years old, building a company, and writing with a kind of intensity I haven’t experienced before. Ideas that used to exist only in my imagination are becoming actual things. There’s something remarkable about watching the life you’ve envisioned begin taking shape around you.

And yet, something familiar has returned.

Anger. Anxiety. The instinct to get up and leave.

It’s strange how the mind can respond to progress. You spend years fighting to build something meaningful, and when pieces of it finally begin coming together, some part of you starts looking for the nearest exit.

I recognize that impulse. I know how to withdraw. How to disappear into my own thoughts. How to convince myself that solitude is always preferable to the complications of being known. Sometimes I even feel resistance toward the writing itself, as if the work that’s helping me understand my life is also forcing me to confront things I’d rather leave untouched.

There’s a part of me that still mistakes escape for self-preservation.

Carl Jung explored the shadow, those aspects of ourselves we struggle to recognize or accept. I’ve been thinking about that more lately. Not as some mysterious force controlling my decisions, but as a way of acknowledging that the parts of myself I’d rather deny don’t simply disappear because I’ve become more disciplined or accomplished.

I can be generous and selfish. Loving and distant. Patient one day and angry the next. I can care deeply about my family while still struggling with the demands of being present.

I don’t become a better man by pretending those contradictions don’t exist.

And I don’t have to obey every impulse simply because it comes from somewhere inside me.

For years, I associated strength with endurance. With how much I could carry, how much I could survive, how long I could keep moving when my body and mind wanted to stop. There’s value in endurance, but I’ve started questioning the way we glorify it. A person can become exceptionally good at surviving while knowing very little about how to enjoy being alive.

My body has changed. So has my mind. There are things I once did without hesitation that require more consideration now. Some mornings demand patience I never expected to need. Even physical strength has taken on another meaning.

I’m beginning to understand that self-preservation isn’t always about fighting harder.

Sometimes it’s about recognizing when fighting has become another way of refusing to rest.

There’s something in the Tao Te Ching that keeps drawing me back: the relationship between strength and softness. Water doesn’t need to become stone to shape the world around it. Its movement, persistence, and ability to yield are part of its power.

That challenges me.

I’ve spent so much of my life bracing against things. Preparing for conflict. Questioning institutions. Challenging beliefs. Trying to understand the systems that shape our lives. I’ve become comfortable with resistance.

But I don’t want resistance to become my entire personality.

I want to know what I look like when I’m not defending myself against something.

When I’m simply a father. A son. A man reading a book, making music, laughing with his family, or enjoying an afternoon without feeling guilty about everything happening elsewhere in the world.

I want to experience the life I’m working so hard to protect.

And spiritually, something is shifting.

I’m examining beliefs I inherited long before I possessed the language to question them. I’m interested in what remains when I remove the obligation to believe something simply because it’s familiar. I’m not interested in replacing one unquestionable authority with another. I want room for discovery, contradiction, and the possibility that some of my most important questions may remain unanswered.

Maybe there’s a kind of faith in allowing uncertainty to exist.

Maybe the sacred doesn’t require me to have everything figured out.

I’ve spent years looking outward, trying to understand the world and my place in it. That work matters to me. It always will. But there comes a point when examining everything around you becomes easier than examining the person doing all that questioning.

I don’t want to save the world while neglecting my own life.

I don’t want my sons to know me only as a man who worked hard, endured suffering, and carried responsibilities. I want them to know that I loved being alive. That I found reasons to laugh. That I made room for joy, tenderness, curiosity, and the ordinary experiences that make a life worth remembering.

I want them to understand that strength can include vulnerability. That a person can change without abandoning who they are. That sometimes the bravest thing a man can do is remain present when every old instinct tells him to run.

I’m not trying to become a perfect human being.

I’m trying to become a more complete one.

And perhaps that’s the point of an unfinished temple. It doesn’t cease to have meaning because the construction continues. Its unfinished state doesn’t make it worthless. There’s something sacred about the work itself, about the hands that keep returning, about the willingness to rebuild without knowing exactly what the finished structure will look like.

At forty, I don’t need to have every answer.

I want the next forty years, if life gives them to me, to contain more than survival.

I want to build something that lasts. Love the people who are here. Explore the world. Experience beauty without feeling the need to justify it. Write because I love writing, not because every sentence has to become a weapon or a warning.

And when that familiar urge to disappear returns, I want to recognize it without surrendering to it.

My parents gave me a name.

Rashad.

I’ve carried it through every version of myself. Through every departure, every return, every experience that changed me.

I’m beginning to understand that coming home doesn’t always require a journey.

Sometimes it requires the decision to stay.

And this time, I want to be here.