Setting Your Sails for the Longer Journey
Why wouldn’t you take the quickest route, find the easiest way? Our lives are so wired for quick solutions and fixes. We constantly find ways to make life more comfortable for ourselves.
Yet will the easiest way bring you the most fulfilment?
When did you take the longer, perhaps less travelled route?
There will be times when you’ve found yourself in a larger commitment - to someone or something. It can be frustrating when the dream seems far off and you know you need to make a big investment, but as a long journey, you find a satisfaction and sense of purpose in getting all your provisions on board and setting your sails for a fair wind.
As you move towards fulfilling on your commitment, life changes because you change. You have to adapt, cultivate greater awareness, learn new skills and take some risks. If the mission is deeply important to you the journey is likely to involve some healing of old wounds, creation of new relationships with different parts of yourself, with others, and then showing up a little differently in the world. As your values shift, you move with them; it’s a metamorphosis; you rise from the ashes of your former self.
Maybe you know this profoundly to be true.
Cellularly we know this. And we feel it. Our bodies store our experience; we are ‘shaped’ by it. Our history and culture determine who we are. Life’s offer is to develop the curiosity needed to step into the challenge of change.
Writing is not a new skill for me, yet regularly showing up in it (like this..!) is a new behaviour. I learn not to overthink, to overwrite, to judge myself, to compare or let my inner critic rule. My challenge is to work the muscle of discipline that shows up and writes every week. Whatever. Inspired or no. With ‘something to say’ or not.
Sometimes we want so much insurance, so much capital, so much control, in case the wind ahead suddenly changes. There’s surely a balance between need for security and taking risk, yet to allow life to work with us, for spirit to flow, to participate, for our souls to speak from their slumber, it’s about the courage to embrace that step into the unknown.
How would it be to invite that in?
The challenges and bumps on the road slowly become the delights of the journey. On reflection, when the storm is past, we look back and say “well, that challenge made me, it was that difficulty I overcame that moved me to where I am now, it was the shift in the relationship with myself that made that possible”.
Why would you choose the easier path?
What future are you setting your sails for?