When you start on your journey, you never expect it to be a straight line. It’s not the ups and downs of life that bother us the most, it’s the wondering in the desert as we are lost. It’s when we realize we are lost that we fail ourselves the most. As we wonder through the desert, our minds try their best to make us believe everything is okay. Its main objective is to preserve the self.
At some point the enslaved mind will break free, when you realize that everything is not okay. This is where you can either go up or down. It is where you break free or give in. One of the most common things to do is to look at what was lost along the way. Time, money, friends, opportunities or maybe all of the above. It’s a very negative outlook as it opens a box of what ifs. The past is the past and we should move forward with whatever we can and not look back.
This accumulation of the past is the greatest threat to our future. It is one of the few places where we deceptively give up control. It is what constrains the way we can change. It holds us back more than anything else in our lives. The issue is what happens when we break from our past. We float away detached from everything. Our natural reaction is to grasp for something, to find something to latch onto and orient ourselves. Sometimes we prioritize this over our larger mission. We lose sight of why we detached from our past in the first place. This time we are not lost. We are distracted. We may have lost hope or feel our mission was wrong. Either way we want an exit, an escape.
Soon we feel empty as the distraction loses its novelty, we once again realize everything is not okay. We feel the cost of the distraction. The next step is whether we justify it or accept it. We have to make the effort to let the past live in the past. Once we do this, we must detach ourselves and float back into space to resume what we started. The journey is long and at times can be difficult. What makes it worse is our conception of how a journey should be. We envision a starting point and ending point in which our journey will take place in between. The issue is that our journey has neither point. Discovering who we are and how to live is like an evolving organism where the journey is simply the evolution. Everything is not okay, but because you have made it so.
