Sometimes we do not want to understand our past. We want to remove it. Not all of it, maybe. Only the dirty parts. The shame. The mistakes. The people who damaged our trust. The years when we feel we lived as someone we never wanted to become.
There is a private fantasy inside this wish. One day, after enough healing, enough clarity, enough distance, we will finally become clean. The old anger will leave. The old fear will stop following us. The memories will lose their teeth. Then real life will begin. Then we will finally be ready to become the person we were supposed to be.
But life almost never gives us that kind of clean beginning. It does not say: heal first, then start. Become confident first, then speak. Stop being afraid first, then enter the world. Most of the time, everything happens at once. We live while we are still afraid. We work while we still have doubts. We try to build something while shame, tiredness, envy, anxiety, and old questions still live inside us.
That is why the image of the lotus stayed with me. At first, I heard the mantra Om mani padme hum only as something beautiful. Soft. Spiritual. Almost too clean. But the lotus itself is not a clean image. A lotus grows from mud. From dark water. From the place we would rather not touch. Its roots are not in some perfect, untouched ground. They are in the swamp.
And that is where the image becomes human.
I felt this strongly in Canada. From the outside, my life looked like movement: delivery, film sets, office work, video editing, Supa, channels, old ideas, and eventually a return to writing. I was always doing something. I was always moving somewhere. On paper, it could be called growth. A journey. A new life.
But from the inside, it did not always feel like growth. Sometimes it was just another tired evening with an open laptop and a strange exhaustion with myself. I looked at my life and did not see a beautiful story. I saw attempts that did not fully connect. Old work. Old identities. A dream I was afraid to say out loud. A project that gave me direction, but not the whole answer.
The hardest part was not only that I felt lost. The hardest part was that I felt late.
I could read the same years in two ways. I could look at them and see work, survival, adaptation, movement. Or I could look at them and see proof that I had wasted time. The second version becomes very convincing when you are tired. It tells you that other people were building a real life while you were still trying to understand yours. It tells you that you should have known sooner, left sooner, started sooner, become yourself sooner.
That thought can become its own punishment. Not a public punishment. Not something anyone else can see. A quiet one. A private one. The past starts replaying itself inside you. Old mistakes. Words you said. Words you did not say. Years that seem to have disappeared into the wrong version of your life. You imagine the person you might have been if you had feared less, needed less approval, and trusted yourself sooner.
But punishment does not create a new past. It only makes the old story feel more true.
I think this is one reason people look for meaning in pain. Not because they want a lecture. Not because they need someone to say, “Everything happened for your growth.” When pain is real, that can sound cheap. If someone has lived through loss, betrayal, illness, anxiety, immigration, or years inside the wrong life, they do not always need an explanation first. First, they need to survive. To get up. To eat. To sleep. To make it to the next day.
When you are only trying to survive, meaning can almost feel offensive. You do not want a beautiful quote. You want the noise inside to stop. So you distract yourself. You scroll. You work because stopping feels dangerous. You stay busy because silence starts asking questions. I do not mean this as judgment. Sometimes distraction is the only way a person gets through the day.
But if we only numb something, it does not disappear. It stays under the surface. It waits.
That is why I want to be careful with the image of the lotus. Pain does not become useful just because we found a beautiful image for it. It does not make us better by itself. It does not prove that some higher plan was behind it. Sometimes pain is just pain. Betrayal is betrayal. Some situations are unfair. Some people really do hurt us.
And when people say “no mud, no lotus” too quickly, it can feel like they are trying to cover real pain with a beautiful phrase. The image of the lotus should not ask anyone to be grateful for what broke them. Meaning should not become another way of denying the wound. It should not force us to pretend the mud was good.
For me, the lotus became powerful only when I stopped hearing it as “the mud is good.” No. The mud is not good. It simply does not have to become your whole identity.
This is where the jewel appears. The jewel in the lotus.
For me, the jewel is not a perfect, clean version of a person. Not someone who never gets angry, never feels fear, never doubts, never envies, never collapses. That kind of person does not feel real. The real jewel is not made from perfection. It is made from lived experience. From what we notice while life is still happening.
We begin to understand how fear works inside us. We start to see that anxiety is not always about the future. Sometimes it comes from old pain. We see how shame can still control the voice years later. We see how easily approval can be confused with love, or with direction, or with a life that actually belongs to us. We can spend years trying to become the right kind of person, and then suddenly feel the terrible simplicity of the truth: this is not me.
That understanding does not erase the pain. It does not make the past beautiful. But it can make the past not empty.
The pearl is not the wound itself. The pearl is the part of us that slowly learns to speak more honestly. The part that starts to notice our own defenses. The part that can recognize when an old fear is trying to control today’s life. The part that says: this hurt me, but it does not get to become my entire name.
There is an important difference here. Using pain as material does not mean saying thank you to it. You can learn something after betrayal and still refuse to call betrayal a gift. You can become more careful with yourself after difficult years and still refuse to romanticize those years. Sometimes the value appears not because the pain was right, but because you refused to leave it as a meaningless hole inside you.
This is why the swamp still works for me as an image of human life. Not because the swamp is romantic. It is not. But because under the surface of real life there are lies, cruelty, envy, fear, people who pull us down, and parts of ourselves that are not always beautiful either. There are old stories down there. Old roles. Old versions of us. Things we would rather not touch.
But if we only look down, we can forget the sun above the water.
Maybe the most dangerous part of the mud is not that it happened. Maybe the danger begins when we start using it as our name. I am the person who was betrayed. I am the person who is late. I am the person who failed. At first, these sentences only describe an experience. Slowly, they can become an identity.
I understand this very well. Life is cruel in one specific way: there are no saves. It is not a game where we can load an old file and play the level again. We cannot go back and live childhood without shame. We cannot undo leaving, meeting someone, making a mistake, staying silent, or spending years in a role that no longer fit us.
But maybe this is exactly why the one take matters so much. If there are no saves, the point is not to live perfectly. The point is not to give up on the current scene because the first scenes were painful. As long as we are alive, the story is not finished. The past is already in the edit. But it does not have to be the final scene.
I like the idea that life is a play. Or a film. Or one long take. Not because it makes life easier, but because it makes it more serious. This moment matters not because it is clean or perfect. It matters because it is still happening. We cannot live it again. We can only meet it more honestly than we did yesterday.
Maybe you also have your own mud. Maybe it does not look dramatic from the outside. A family where you were not understood. A school where you were shamed. A relationship after which you became more careful. Immigration, where the old version of you broke and the new one was not ready yet. A job where you were not yourself for too long. Mistakes that return at night.
From the outside, it can look like a normal life. Inside, it can become the story we keep using to explain why we are still not free.
There may not be a simple answer to this. One image cannot fix everything. Sometimes we need help, therapy, sleep, food, safety, movement, silence, and time. Sometimes understanding our pain only means we can finally see the shape of the wound. It does not mean the wound has closed.
But even if healing is slow, there is still a small choice. Not to justify the pain. Not to pretend there was no mud. But also not to give the mud the right to become all of you. To say something more honest: this happened. This is part of my story, but it is not my whole story.
And maybe that is what I now hear in Om mani padme hum. The jewel in the lotus. Not as a religious lecture. Not even as the exact meaning. More as a personal symbol. Inside a human life, something precious can come out of chaos. Not a perfectly clean life. Not victory over everything. Something quieter: understanding.
The lotus does not deny the mud. It does not argue with it. It does not pretend the mud was never there. It simply grows in another direction. The roots remain in the dark, but the flower reaches toward the light.
That feels very human to me. Maybe maturity, or even enlightenment, is not about escaping the swamp completely. Maybe it is about growing without becoming the swamp.
I do not know why each of us has this kind of mud. I do not know if we can ever fully understand our pain. But I think there is something inside us that does not want to stay at the bottom. Something still looks for air. For light. For meaning. For the next scene.
Maybe we were not meant to be clean from the beginning.
Maybe we were meant to grow.
And maybe that is already enough reason to keep reaching for the sun.