There is nothing wrong with us because there is nothing wrong

What’s the right path?

How do we avoid picking the wrong one?

And if we do, can we switch along the way?

We need to stop asking these kinds of questions. Because there’s no such thing is the right path.

In the micro, the right decision is the one we make, and in the macro, the right path is the one we take. Besides, which path we take is less important than why we choose to take it, what we carry with us, whom we pick to travel with, how we talk to ourselves along the way, what we learn and become in the process, and how fulfilled we feel by the time we arrive.

In my twenties, my career satisfaction was restricted to a single scenario. There was only one version of my professional identity, and any detour from that path was not only wrong, but stupid and futile. According to me, at least.

Until my thirties, when life started showing me that the landscape of these strange detours was actually quite breathtaking. And in many cases, more rewarding than the original path to which my naïve heart was so zealously fixed.

Reminds me of a lovely mantra from an old spiritual advisor of mine:

There is nothing wrong with you because there is nothing wrong.

We westerners struggle with this brand of thinking, since our obsession with right or wrong, good or bad, win or lose, borders on the pathological. Schools condition us for the first sixteen years of our lives that there is a right path, and if we’re not on it, god help us.

But that kind of thinking has zero relationship with reality. There are as many paths as there are people not to take them. And it’s time we stopped putting so much damn pressure on ourselves.

Miller once wrote that life itself is a voyage of discovery, and that we take the path in order to eventually become that path himself.

Now there’s a compelling image. Relaxing one’s sense of separation. Someone becomes so completely present and integrated in their reality that it no longer matter if the walker chooses the path or if the path chooses the walker, because they’re on in the same.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What if your professional journey could be forever altered and intentionally molded to fit anything that excites and feeds your soul?