A key turning point of life and a sure sign of maturity is when you stop running away. From whatever you’ve been running from for so long that you don’t even remember or realize.
A good clue that you’ve been running is that you start feeling far away from your own life and your own work.
Fast or slow, at some point all that running gets exhausting. And now you’re far away and can’t quite figure out why you started or where you’re really going. You might resent that, or figure it doesn’t matter all that much, because even though it’s exhausting, it’s familiar and comfortable. You’ve been doing it for so long you’re good at it. You’ll still make it, you’re sure of it.
But eventually it catches up to you. Often, it’s an external event, one of life’s big, lovely loops that shakes you to the core and you stall. A health scare, a job loss, or losing someone close to you.
If we’re lucky, we start feeling a little lost.
Why? Because when we don’t know what to do, we start to pay real attention.
Feeling far away is to be examined and understood, says David Whyte, rather than disliked and dismissed.
Interestingly, it’s an essential part of the discovery process, of unearthing a foundation with which we had lost touch.
If we pay attention, we start asking questions of ourselves. We may start with the wrong ones at first, but if we persist, we can get to better, more real, more helpful questions.
This is it. Not whether you’ve found the right answers or none at all, it’s that you’re asking the questions, and you’re paying real attention.
You may have to look back a little, you may have to look down the road a little. But what helps the most is looking inside yourself.
In time, things will begin to make sense. You may not always like it, but there it is. In time, you realize some things will never make sense. You may not like it, but you’ll make your peace with it.
Congratulations. You’re not running away anymore, but now you’re moving forward.
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