There’s something incredibly special about your path… if you can find it.
Look, why aren’t you looking for your path?
Seriously, why waste time with all of the roads that other people have walked before you?
And I say this as a sort of professional path-finder. I help people find the stars they need to navigate by. I give them the tools they need to move forward.
But for all that, their path is still their path.
And that’s what makes it beautiful.
It’s like the mythologist Joseph Campbell said:
“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
This is exactly right. A lot of people come to me wanting to be told what to do. They just want someone to hold their hand and walk them along, guiding them every step of the way.
Some people just want to give me their money so I can invest it for them!
(I’ve never done this. I teach people how to fish. I’m not in the business of selling fishes.)
And look, I can understand the appeal. If there’s a path that’s gotten someone from A to B in the past, why not just copy and paste everything that they did?
But just as no two people are the same, no two moments in time are the same either. The path that I had to walk must necessarily be different to your path, even if our destinations are the same.
And if you’re walking someone else’s path – if you’re trying to live someone else’s life – you’re missing out on one of the great treasures that life has to offer you.
There’s a great joy in discovering what your path is.
Because to find your path you have to find yourself. You have to find your own feet beneath you.
And you have to open your senses up to life. You have to feel into where you are pushed and where you are pulled. You have to notice those days where there is wind and your back and the road is gentle before you, just as you have to notice those days where the world pushes back, or where it simply looks away and won’t meet your eye.
It’s a discipline that some people might call ‘awareness’. But where these two things meet – in that place where the world and your own unique feet come together – that’s your path.
That’s yours. In fact it’s you, as much as anything in this world is you.
And maybe that, as much as anything, is what we are here to discover.
So don’t half-arse it.
Commit to finding the path that is yours and yours alone.
It’s your path that is home to everything worth knowing.
DB