On wandering off... and picking back up in pursuit of what we really want.
Sunshiny greetings, Reader,
Maybe I'm preaching to the choir, but it seems to me life is a big ol' self-discovery journey.
It's experimental, avant garde, a whole lotta jokers and wild cards, a whole lot of winging it and making things up as we go, and basically meta-physical and meta-everything else, too.
And seeing as how this is a largely experimental endeavour rather than a predictable one, having expectations, which we can't help but have, gets pretty dicey. There's so much more at play than our planning skills and good intentions.
Choosing our adventure
That's not to say that pursuing a personally gratifying, soul-satisfying experience on this earthly journey isn't worth setting out to do.
It's just that this life requires a measure of resilience that seems to take us by surprise.
We get behind and altogether lost, we fall down and we even fall apart, we get blindsided and disappointed, we get our heart broken, we get angry and scared and jittery over what's going to jump out at us next, and things just up and change all the time.
But the journey keeps going.
And we don't have a say in a whole lot, but that's exactly where the experimental part comes in.
That's where we get to choose our own adventure in more ways than we've been taught back when we learned from school and culture and our home life how things work.
Supposedly how they work, that is.
Just keep going
A while ago I talked about going on a no-complaining, no-criticizing "word-and-thought diet." There was just one rule: When you get off track, pick back up wherever you are and keep going, no biggie.
Which was a good thing, because at some point I realized I'd wandered quite a long way from my intention, to the point where I'd forgotten all about it. But I did what I myself recommended—I picked back up right where I was and kept going.
WHAT a relief.
No review to go over with myself to figure out what happened. No reflection required. No self-berating about my lack of focus or follow-through or discipline.
I just picked back up and kept going.
That's all we ever have to do, really. Just pick back up and keep going.
Sure, we can comb through "what happened" or "what went wrong" in order to get some insight on our patterns.
But who's to say that will benefit us more than it just slows us down or sets us back?
Now, today, this moment
Occasionally when someone asks me what the difference is between coaching (what I do) and therapy, I say it's this—in coaching we work from where we are, not from where we've been.
All the stuff we've been hauling along with us is still there, but that's not where we start—we deal with those things as they enter the scene along the way. We don't have to go looking for them.
The starting point is now, today, this moment.
We pick up and keep going.
If we had to figure out what went awry every time we got off track in life we'd never have time left to get back on track.
So I'm a big fan of just picking up where you are and getting back to what you wandered off from doing.
Not that it's easy-breezy to ride along as though life is a lazy river and not the rapids it often is, but nevertheless, picking back up in order to keep going isn't complicated.
It's simple, even if it's not automatic, and even if sometimes there's a whole lot of space between getting off track and then picking back up where we left off.
After all, most of us have some idea of what we want in life, no matter how much we've wandered off—and it's based on a feeling we want even more than the things we expect to supply us with that feeling.
That feeling is where we're headed, whether with sharp focus or vague intention, or some of each at any given moment.
No matter what the material specifics are, I believe that what we each want most is to feel like our whole self, real and fully alive.
In the easiest of times as well as in stressful times, this is what we still want.
And shoot, who's to say that this wild storm of a time period we're living in isn't somehow productive for us on this mysterious journey as we search that much harder to find what's most important and meaningful to us.
So pick up where you are, without worry about where you've wandered off to or why, and let's walk along together on this journey we're sharing.
