“We are the map makers tracing lines of land that others cannot see…”
Joel McKerrow
Go ahead. You are free to explore. Take a sharp turn, swing left when you thought you were planning on going right. Turn down the road you have never been down before. See where it leads.
There’s not a right way to get to our destination because even our destinations change. Most of the time, we don’t land where we imagined. For those of determined to live out our intentions, put flesh on our dreams, and push for our ideals this can be a maddening discovery.
The map likes to manifest itself as we walk along. Our steps are never certain as we’d like to think.
Life is constantly shifting. Sometimes those movements happen without our knowing, soft and sly, as we sleep. Other times, life seems to crash like tectonic plates and whole landscapes within us are transformed forever.
I do myself a favor when I stop forcing life to fit into my mold, even the one I made last year.
We despise the pliability of life. We feel threatened by its flexibility, how it bends, stretches, turns, evolves. We can’t harness it into our weekly calendar and make it do what we want, and we go crazy trying.
Life is hardly stationary, although we daily demand for it to stay put. We feel seasick, wanting the rolling waves to stop already. We try to tame life when we refuse to flow in and out with the seasons. We try to chain it to the fence post when we close ourselves off to other ways of seeing and being in the world.
Life is kind though. It never forces our participation but invites us to discover the profound contentment of curiosity, the beauty of dwelling within questions, the peace of welcoming the unexpected, and the joy layered beneath mystery.
The well-trodden routes, your pre-approved paths, and the original plan will always be there. You can opt out any time.
But here’s the truth: You can’t mess this up. You are free.
