Summer 2023

Carving your own path

05/22/2023

Can you ever remember a time when your life changed in the blink of an eye? One minute you were going along, knowing your place in the world, and suddenly something shifts, you get some news, an event happens, and your life is forever changed. This does happen to everyone occasionally. But most of the time, change is slow, much more gradual, unfolding, and it’s more the reflection back that makes us realize the change. When you start to become more aware of life unfolding in front of you, and also start the process of reflection, you can see the areas that moved along without any impact from you or your decisions, but more often than not, you can also see the places where you unintentionally, or blindly participated in your life going a certain way, because you weren’t really involved in the process. This can be an enlightening and sometimes embarrasing thing to look at. When you start to take full accountability for your life and where it goes, you have to be ready to get involved, and to recognize that you may have more choices and more say in how your life goes than you originally thought.

If you want to start taking a more active role in the direction your life is going, first you have to make peace with where you are at now. I see this as a sort of reconciliation with your past self to have made choices which brought you here, and an acceptance that your past cannot necessarily be changed. This is not to say that things happen to people that they have no control over, because that is true. We do not have a choice over many areas of our life circumstances, but saying that we have no control, or very little control is selling yourself short. You may be surprised to find how much control and impact you actually do have when you begin this process!

To begin the process of acceptance and reconciliation, allow yourself to float back to around your teenage years, this is when personal choices really start to come into play. Not saying you don’t have personal choice before that, but as a child, you are heavily impacted and affected by the choices of those who are in the positions of care-takers and teachers. As teenagers we start practicing autonomy and agency, often in reaction to our environment. But even those choices affect who we are today, and whether or not you “felt” like you had a choice, taking back control over your life today, means saying “I made those choices, for better or for worse” and accepting their impact in your life, so that you can start to carve your own path forward despite the choices your 15 year old self made. Then continue moving throughout your life and recognize all the areas that you made choices that altered the direction of your life, and really own those choices. Sometimes this requires saying, “I really didn’t feel like I had a choice in that moment”, whether due to naivete, in-experience, pressure from friends or parents or partners, but regardless, you need to own them as choices made.

Once you can start to accept those choices as your life path up until now, start to realize that this is the ground you have cultivated for moving forward. Just like a garden is impacted by it’s environment (rain, organic matter, bugs, polution etc) your life is impacted by it’s environment. But there is a lot that you can put into that garden, aka your life, that can change the outcome. Are you going to weed every day, are you going to water it when it doesn’t rain, are you going to plant things at the appropriate time and season, so that you can have the crop you want. This is the process of living an involved and concious life.