Faltering footsteps.
Do you ever feel lost? Not just the “I have no idea where I am but I know if I keep driving I’ll eventually hit the freeway” kind of lost. I’m talking about the “I can’t see where I should step next, and I don’t even know where I am going’ kind of lost.
The kind of lost where you just don’t know where to start.
I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to see the entire pathway before I even got started. My ‘need-addiction’ is certainty (or for want of a better word, security) so I have always been slow to start a new journey until I could see how it was all going to work out.
That seemed like a good, safe strategy. Until I realized that in not taking any pathway I couldn’t fully see meant that I never chose a pathway at all. I just stayed where I was.
And that was killing me.
So I started a new path. From that new path other possibilities followed, until I found myself chasing in many different directions, with new possibilities around every corner.
Suddenly there was a strange form of security in continually choosing different pathways, never having to follow one too closely. Always another option, another path, another avoidance, another escape.
It was then that I realized that although I was moving, I was still not progressing. In fact, I was using the constant motion as a security against failure, for never coming to the end meant I could never fail at that thing, because I would change direction whenever something became hard, and the potential for failure reared its ugly head.
And so I waited too long to move, and then moved in a thousand directions, none of them coherent, none of them specific, none of them leading to somewhere that I wanted to be.
And that was when I figured out just how lost I really was.
So now I’m trying to find my road. The pathway not only of peace, but of purpose, of passion, of presence, and of progression. This work is a step on that pathway, but I don’t know where it is going. I only know that I am on a path, and I’m trying to find my way into my purpose.
I know it is to help, to inspire, to lift burdens, to make hearts lighter, and to align all of what small gifts I have been given into a course of action that will hopefully bring me joy, and finally, after all these years, a small measure of peace.
It is said that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so here I am. Faltering footsteps through a path I do not understand, cannot see, and can only hope is in front of me.
In explaining this today, I hope to help you realize that our paths are rarely, if ever, laid straight out in front of us. Very few of us ‘have it all together’. Most of us are trying to find our way, and hoping that we are on the right one.
May you find peace and purpose on your journey, today and always.
-- Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings