When a Man in Movement Meets His Luck

For those I have and have not had the pleasure of meeting yet, allow me to reintroduce myself: my name is Rahil.

Rahil means the one who travels, the one who journeys, the one who departs. In Hindi, in Urdu, and in Arabic. So for those I have and have not had the pleasure of meeting yet, allow me to reintroduce myself: my name is Rahil.

This life has been interesting to say the least. You now ask who I am, what I’ve done, why I’m here, and where I come from; but a carefully crafted and curated timeline of events will not do either of us any favors. While I could tell you Los Angeles birthed me, Bombay shaped me, and New York raised me, you will neither learn nor understand. This shit is too personal.

Still, if you think this sounds like vague, mysterious, esoteric bullshit, all I ask is for your fleeting indulgence for I would like to tell you a short story.

For the first two decades of my life, everything was attainable. Everything was achievable. The how, the where, and the when were not always under my command, but the outcome was never in question. The goal was never up for debate. The job was always finished.

Everything changed 8 years ago. Everything fell apart. My body ballooned. My mind deflated. My soul had been crushed. My ascent had been capped at the start. The phenomenon was familiar, but the physics were foreign. And this time was different, because this time I broke.

I knew something was wrong. The person I saw I no longer recognized, so I stopped looking. The story I told no longer made sense, so I stopped telling. I was dead and alive at the same time. Still, the answer seemed so simple: a bug in my software. I just needed to find it.

Trust when I say I tried everything. Therapy. Philosophy. Religion. Spirituality. Asceticism. Nihilism. Hedonism. Brute force. Pure surrender. Still, life was circles – explicitly vicious, implicitly virtuous – as I descended through each ring of hell. I moved a lot and got nowhere. Little did I know I had been cursed by the gods.

I was Sisyphus. Sisyphus was me. I pushed the boulder up the hill every single day only for the boulder to come rolling down every time I came close to the top. Poetic justice hits different in perpetuity. The dark night of the soul is just another night in purgatory.

Fast forward to last year, on the verge of collapse, I finally figured it out. Not only had I been diagnosed with papillary thyroid carcinoma, I had spent the past 7+ years – the years of life meant to establish the rest, the years of life typically defined by youth and physical prime – undiagnosed with hypothyroidism. You see, the bug was not in my software; I had been dealing with a hardware issue the entire time.

The next thing I did: shed a single tear. The only thing I felt: a weightless relief.

As you can imagine, I learned a few things along the way, most importantly what a man is made of when it’s all stripped away. That everything I had been searching for, yearning for, in desperate pursuit of, had been within me the entire time. If only I knew you need not set your house on fire to find your meaning. If only I knew you need not burn it to the ground to discover your purpose. Yet, I would not change a thing for a life without extreme variance and volatility cannot generate extreme returns.

I knew no better. I would not have signed up for this.

Still you’ll ask why I’m here and where I’m going. To that I say: I am here to build, to create. I am here to prove something to myself, to show myself I can still be who I’ve always wanted to be. I am in pursuit of greatness, but the outcome is irrelevant because I finally like who I’m becoming. I am here to enter the arena, and I am here to move, for a man in movement will meet his luck. Whatever else may or may not follow, this time, the boulder is getting to the top

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