Today, friends, let’s stop waiting for the tides to turn or the stars to align or the walls to come crumbling down before we allow ourselves to entertain the idea that we can have the life we want.
Because the truth is, the life we’ve been waiting for won’t simply appear once today’s storm has passed or tomorrow’s dust has settled— this kind of life is built from the inside out. It is born of a thousand “next right steps.” Shaped by the way we choose to respond to our world. Created by our willingness to look inward, as Walt Whitman did, and ask: What can I do to find “happiness, not in another place but this place… not for another hour, but this hour?”
Today friends, let’s stop waiting for our real lives to begin because they’ve already begun.
Let’s stop working for the weekend, living for someday, and hitching our happiness to future circumstances over which we have no control.
And let’s remember that in order to find the life we want, we have to be willing to examine the life we have. To search for clues in the chaos. To push through all today’s messy, scary, imperfection so that we may re-discover the trail of breadcrumbs we left for ourselves before things got so complicated.
Our lives really are waiting for us. Speaking to us. Pulling us forward. Not in some future moment, but in this moment.
And the only way we’ll find them is if we begin our search right here. Right now. From right where we are.
I think I have a pretty good handle on that regarding life in general. I always crack up when my sister says, “OMG, I would so hate your life. All the insecurity, all the uncertainty.” It makes me laugh, because the routine that is her life, which she loves, would drive me bonkers. Where I tend to get all noodle-wimpy is in my profession. Finding the fine line between hoping it will happen and making it happen.