A few years ago, my partner and I decided to try psilocybin. It was planned and deliberate, a weekend set aside for it. She went first, five grams, while I stayed sober and watched over her. The next weekend, it was my turn.

Most of the experience was beautiful and hard to describe in ways that don't sound like someone trying too hard. But one thing stuck. At some point during the trip, I started repeating a sentence. Over and over. She told me about it afterward.

"Love is the beginning and the end."

My first reaction wasn't awe. It was embarrassment. It sounded like something you'd find on a candle.

I didn't want to accept it because the truth, if that's what it was, felt too simple to be taken seriously. I'd spent years reading, questioning, chasing complex answers about purpose and meaning and direction. And the thing that came out of my mouth when every filter was removed was something a teenager would write in a notebook.

So I set it aside. Not deliberately. I just let it get buried under more sophisticated ideas. I read about consciousness, about the subconscious, about philosophy and psychology and all the frameworks that make a person feel like they're getting closer to something. And they helped. But none of them replaced what I'd already said out loud on a Saturday afternoon with my eyes closed.

It took years to stop resisting it. Not because the idea got more complex. Because I ran out of arguments against it.

I know what happens when it's missing. Ten years in a marriage where love wasn't present and neither of us said so. A career where I moved every two years because nothing felt like it mattered enough to stay. Distractions that smoothed every quiet moment before it could ask a real question. All of that was what a life looks like when the foundation is absent and you refuse to admit it. You chase, you perform, you fill the days with motion that looks like progress but doesn't feel like anything when you stop.

Here's the mechanism I keep running into. You resist simple answers not because they're wrong, but because they feel unsophisticated. Complexity becomes a way to postpone acceptance. You read another book, explore another framework, have another conversation, not because the previous answer was insufficient, but because it arrived too easily to feel earned.

Your mind treats difficulty as a proxy for depth. If the answer came quickly, it must be shallow. If it sounds like something everyone already knows, it can't be the thing you've been searching for. So you keep searching. Not toward something. Away from the obvious.

That's how I spent years circling something I'd already found. The sentence didn't change. I just kept looking for a version of it that sounded harder to reach.

What I eventually stopped resisting wasn't a philosophy. It was something more basic. Until you can sit with who you are without reaching for distraction, performance, or someone else to stabilize you, whatever you build carries the same fracture. Relationships become rescue attempts. Work becomes proof of worth. Busyness becomes insulation. None of it holds because the thing underneath it is hollow.

Once that shifts, not perfectly, not permanently, but even slightly, everything built on top of it changes weight. Relationships stop being need. Work stops being performance. Quiet stops being a threat.

I knew this years ago. I said it out loud in a room with my eyes closed. Then I spent years avoiding the simplest thing I'd ever learned because it didn't sound smart enough to believe.

The move I come back to when I catch myself overcomplicating things is to ask: "What would I say about this if I wasn't trying to sound intelligent?" Usually the first answer, the obvious one, the one I want to dress up in better language, is the one that's actually true. The embarrassment I feel about its simplicity is almost always a sign I'm close, not far.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes the complex answer really is the right one. But more often than I'd like to admit, the candle was right.