Finally Arrived
It happens in a moment. Maybe it’s when you are driving down the street with your windows down listening to your favorite song or when you are watching a child you love laugh and play or when you dip your toes into the cool water of a running creek or when you are looking into someone’s eyes and really feel present with that person.
It’s that moment when you realize after all the seeking and the searching and the wondering, you are here, that moment when you realize you are awake in your own life. You are in the life you are meant to experience.
You have stripped away the things that don’t belong to you. You have gathered up the things that do. And you know, this is your life. The life you are meant to have. It doesn’t mean everything will be easy peasy from now on. It doesn’t mean you won’t encounter challenges along the way. But you are in the flow of life and all is well.
I had a moment like that the other day while I was driving on the streets in Charleston. It felt like a giant, years-in-the-making sigh of relief. You may think this feeling is because this time last year I took the leap to leave my secure job of 20 years to start a business I had long envisioned which I now get to watch grow. You may think this feeling is about reaching my final destination after a long journey, finally manifesting what I wanted, having all I’ve desired at last.
But there is no final destination on this journey. My dreams will always be in a place just a little further down the road than where I am now. Dreams just keep growing, keep evolving. This feeling is bigger than that.
This feeling isn’t dependent on whether or not my business is successful or anything else. This is about a feeling, a knowing that everything in my life, past, present, and future, has a place and I am capable, with Divine and human support, to manage it all, to find meaning in it, to grow from it, without expectations of perfection from myself or my life, with room for the messiness and the loss and the pain and the deep gratitude and joy.
How do you get to this feeling, to this knowing? You can start by stripping away everything your culture, your family, the world has told you about who you are and instead asking the Divine spirit within you, “Who am I? What am I meant to experience in this life? Why am I here…in this exact spot…in this exact life? What’s my next step?”
And then with patience allowing the answers to slowly flow through you from day to day. The answers will come to you in the silence, in the stillness, in synchronistic moments, in your connection to the Divine, sometimes in bold proclamations and other times in quiet inner knowings. Every answer will move you closer and closer to your true self, to your authentic life. Every answer will help you find your path, your way to that feeling, to that knowing that you are fully awake, that you have stepped deeply into your own life, that you have finally arrived, not to a destination, but to your truest self.
Thomas Merton wrote, “This true inner self must be drawn up like a jewel from the bottom of the sea, rescued from confusion, from indistinction.” If you haven’t already, I pray you will be willing to swim into the bottom of your spirit and uncover the sparking jewel within you. It’s a risk to dive into those uncharted waters, but it’s worth it. I truly believe it is worth it.
