8 - CHOOSING THE RIGHT PATH
This time last year, I was feeling pretty paralyzed about what path to take…
Should I continue to run my calligraphy business… even though I had been saying for over five years that I had grown out of it?
—OR—
Should I quit my business that had brought me so much growth and abundance and strength… so that I could start something new?
What would that something new even look like?
I knew I wanted to talk about ideas bigger than calligraphy. But earlier that year, I had spent $8K to get certified as a life coach, only to find that being a 1-on-1 coach wasn’t exactly the right fit for me. (I don’t regret taking that certification course at all, because I learned so much… but that’s a story for another post.)
There were so many potential paths I could take - writer, motivational speaker, podcaster, group coach - that I felt a heavy kind of paralysis. So many options… and I had to CHOOSE THE RIGHT ONE.
I was thinking about it in such a perfectionist way… so devastatingly “all-or-nothing”. Like if I didn’t choose the correct path, I would be wasting my time and opportunities and precious middle years and I’d end up dying full of bitter regret.
No wonder I felt paralyzed.
But, over the last year, I’ve come to a different understanding of my choices, and it honestly feels so much more light and free.
The truth I believe now is this: There is no perfect path.
Every single one of them holds a mix of happiness, misery, growth, opportunity, anxiety, surprise sadness, unexpected joy…
And at the end of every single one of them is the ultimate end that comes to all of us: death.
What is the purpose of life?
When I was young and went to a Baptist elementary school, I thought the purpose of life was to be “good” so that I could earn my place in Heaven.
After I had left Christianity behind, I thought the purpose of life was to be excellent, so that I could be worthy and safe.
After I left the “secure” path of corporate law behind, I thought the purpose of life was to be happy.
And now, after almost 10 years of entrepreneurship, after realizing that just because I started a creative business, doesn’t mean I get to be happy all the time… I have a different belief about the purpose of life.
My current belief is this: I think the purpose of life is to BE ALIVE.
I know, that sounds ridiculous, so let me say it differently. I believe that we’re all here to have experiences. That whatever makes up our souls is eternal and unbound by time and physical bodies and petty human concerns. But that infinite existence is pretty contented and monotonous.
And so, our souls choose to come down to Earth and pick a life arc and EXPERIENCE it.
My goal right now isn’t just to be happy. My goal is to be ALIVE and AWAKE to this entire human experience.
That means that if things get hard… it doesn’t necessarily mean that anything has gone wrong. Life’s just supposed to be hard sometimes.
If I feel sad or anxious or challenged… it doesn’t mean I’ve chosen the wrong business or partner or place to live. That’s just how life is sometimes.
If something makes me feel ecstatic and joyful and abundant… I don’t have to be afraid of losing that thing, because I know those feelings will come back again.
If I believe that the purpose of life is to have the MAXIMUM amount of money or success or happiness or Disneyland trips… I’ll always wonder whether I’ve chosen correctly.
But if the purpose of life is just to be open to it all, and feel everything because I know it won’t last forever… then it doesn’t really matter the exact path I choose, as long as I’m doing my best to honor my feelings along the way.
What do the experts say?
Of course, there’s absolutely no way to know whether my belief about the purpose of life is TRUE or just convenient for me right now.
I mean, I live an incredibly privileged, soft, upper middle class life. If I had to endure a truly miserable existence full of suffering and bare survival, I’d probably believe differently…
But this belief FEELS true to me right now.
And turns out, I’m not the only one who believes it.
Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
Elizabeth Gilbert likes to remind us that we’re all “students in Earth school,” here to take it all in and learn from it.
Celebrated poet Andrea Gibson (currently fighting an incurable cancer) wrote a poem that starts: “Imagine when a human dies, the soul misses the body…”
She reads it out loud at around 1 hour 25 minutes into this episode of the “We Can Do Hard Things” Podcast… I listen to that episode every time I need to be reminded of the miracle of life. And it wakes me up everytime. Every time.
So yeah, I like to imagine the infinite version of me is playing a video game and I’m like a Sim, down here on Earth bumping into things, suffering greatly, and experiencing so much awe, and my eternal soul is drinking it all in… the ferocity of being alive.
From one Sim to another,
Shinah
