The day is long. The coffee drips slowly into the pot, sending single splashes of sound ricocheting around the room. The sun rises slowly, as if yawning to its own awakening. The city shakes off the rigor mortis of midnight and plods into the sunbeams. A thousand alarms ring in unison at 6 AM, and thousand more join the chorus at 7. Kisses to partners skitter through the atmosphere as we enact the same ritual we’ve been doing since we’ve had the autonomy to do so.

Hiding inside this routine are the beasts of a wild nature. They lie dormant, unnoticed, until the world ignites them at just the right moment. They test your resolve. They are the unchanging factors of the human experience: chaos, boredom, craving, stress. Every day, we waken, fresh from sleep, assuming that these elements no longer plague our hours. And every day, we are surprised yet again by the cycle. The beasts of a wild nature will never be marooned on the Faraway Islands, left to feast on coconut meat and tropical fish. They will always stick with us, desperate to be noticed.

The beasts of a wild nature come from within us. We hold the key to their existence and their non-existence. If we don’t feed them, they disappear on their own. They pass with quiet non-resistance–shadow fighters longing to be real. But if we give them thought, energy, emotion, they solidify into the realest thing we can imagine. Shapeless, they take the form of any task, word, object, idea. They slip in unnoticed because every day, we forget to change the locks. And every day, we ask ourselves yet again how our house has been burgled.

There are multiple pathways to navigate your way out of the labyrinth where the beasts of a wild nature lurk. Some use journaling to clear the crust of yesterday. Others turn to plant highs, synthetic introspection illuminating the path forward. Some look to their social networks to contextualize difficult happenings, a quorum of trusted insiders marching in lockstep. Others need therapists for keen eyes to register subtle signals from years of experience.

Meditation is another way out of the jungle. The beasts of a wild nature exist no matter where or how you live, but meditation helps ease the pain. These beasts only take the form you give them. You don’t need a pen, pipe, person, or professional to set fire to the paper tigers. The simple act of observing is your match.

Observation is looking at the clean facts of a situation without giving up agency. “The dripping coffee pot is stressing me out,” is not the meditative kind of observation that unlocks freedom. Instead, we say “The coffee pot is dripping.” Stripped of emotion, the world becomes manageable. And the beasts of a wild nature disappear. We step off the chessboard and they have no more moves to make.

This isn’t to say the task of observing is easy. In order to observe, you must remember to observe. Without memory, all is lost. We attach to the stories we tell ourselves without realizing we do so. The story of being a good husband or the ideal student is the story that allows the beasts of a wild nature to wreak havoc. When we need things to go a certain way, we are painfully aware of when they don’t.

The beasts of a wild nature know this, and that’s why they never appear when you are having fun. You are unattached to the story, and there is no place for them to pounce. But when you need your story to be written a certain way, the beasts of a wild nature hijack the plot. They only appear when you need your life to run on a specific track that you’ve chosen–because that’s their opportunity to be noticed, a void brought into stark relief.

When you are confronted with the beasts of a wild nature, the best thing you can do is welcome them. The more energy you give to the fight, the more you lengthen the experience. All we can do as humans is to dive off the cliff into the abyss, knowing that we will always be caught by the gentle net of presence that lies beneath us.

The beasts of a wild nature don’t know how to live in the moment. They are mindlessly scrolling Instagram for the latest supermodel snapshot, exotic travel destinations with no vowels, skirts and shirts in Pantone’s color of the year. They drown in an ocean of their own making, getting pulled out to sea on a riptide of nostalgia, bathing in their own past pain which they try to heal through dominating their world. The beasts of a wild nature don’t know the secret to escaping your past and future lies in your present. They cleave themselves in two, running from the past to get to the future and fearing the future so much that they retreat to the past.

You are not the beasts of a wild nature. Every time one of them appears out of the fog, you can choose now. This doesn’t mean that you suddenly have a choice, but that you can always choose to escape those beasts by being so “here” that there is no more space for anything else. Could you live without pain for a day? You can, and you are unique in this way. Maybe the beasts of a wild nature show up in your days so often out of sheer envy, longing for even the chance to squander what we take for granted. They peer out from behind panes of shimmering glass in the near future and just-missed-it past. The jealousy drives them to be agents of chaos, violent automatons of entropy that push and prod at your reality until they find a place that caves in–into which they flood like an opportunistic virus.

You always have a choice to let in the beasts. Their power comes from your own weakness. The beasts will always live on. You will not. Be here and now so that when you end, you don’t become what plagued you.