I quote, therefore I think: Everything you need

And I think:

This may be the most interesting advice for when you don’t know what it is exactly that you want.

In our earlier years, we move with (and within) the certainty of reaching conventional goals. Society eagerly nudges us from kindergarten to college, get a job, settle down. With some variation, we mostly plug into the system. But with maturity and understanding and a better sense of self, and perhaps a gut-piercing bout or two with real life, many of us find ourselves seeking something that fits and feels better, more right.

And so begins a journey, or perhaps the journey. It begins by ending a relationship, re-evaluating a career, weighing a friendship. But sometimes, you simply just don’t know where to begin, so you keep going while feeling unsettled, untethered, proceeding only with the hope that you will magically stumble upon what you’ve always wanted, whatever that might be.

Some journeys get clearer with time and persistence. But what if you feel like you’re going nowhere, and after all that trying, different doesn’t necessarily feel better?

This is the land of things-aren’t-life or death-but-they-don’t-feel-great-either. It is often shrouded in a fog of confusion and guilt and self-reproach which is hard to see through. But before you give up or resign-but-resent your place in life, consider an alternative perspective.

Maybe all that seeking and wondering wasn’t a letdown, but a forced yet necessary excavation of truths you have so far resisted, a reluctant bowing down of your ego at the feet of your soul.

Perhaps you already have everything you need. Perhaps the journey was not a failure because you didn’t find what you wanted exactly. Perhaps it led you to (re)discover what you already have, and this was the reason that different didn’t feel better or more right or magical. Perhaps it helped you recognize your own depth and the vastness of your own unconscious, and this was exactly what you needed to finally believe in the kind of person you are without the need to convince yourself or anyone else.

Perhaps that is the magic, a slow learning and unlearning, a gradual twist and turn over the fire till you see exactly what you already have, in its rightful place in your life.