Pave Your Way
If life was a map, I’m almost entirely sure it would be shown with a million different places on it and yet no instructions to get from one place to the next. And when the places you can go in life are infinite, and the ways to get are equally endless it has the opposite effect on us - we feel as though there’s no where to go and no way to get there. Are we guessing, and if so is it possible to guess incorrectly? The search for that answer is like standing on the edge of a high-rise building, the view of everything now appearing smaller makes your lungs gasp and stomach turn.
There’s a thousands shades of the place you feel lost in. For some being lost is feeling like they’ve meandered their way into a group of friends that they’re not really suitable for, even maybe even have out grown. Your words feel foreign, as if they are void of any meaning to the people you try to subscribe them to. Your words don’t do justice to things you feel, and the people around you can’t find the meaning. It makes you feel lost, and ironically from a place you used to feel found.
Most days it’s not geographic. In fact, your uncertainty in location is purely internal. You've lost your mind, or rather you're lost in your mind. It's scary in ways that you feel like you're too aware of what you want, and yet oddly enough you're intimidated by that desire and uncertain it's even true. Maybe you don't know what you want at all. And it's so hard to fight for something when you don't know what you're fighting for. It's perhaps the loneliest feeling, to feel lost in yourself.
Finding yourself is a lot like finding your keys. Whenever we lose them we keep checking in places we've already looked. The hook we always place our keys, we check it and check again. Of course they're not there. They weren't the last time you checked. And yet there you are somehow still surprised when we can't find ourselves in places we've been, and in thoughts that never steered us in the right direction to begin with.
It's looking in places you haven't been. It's looking at the things the way you never saw them before. A new perspective isn't just found - it's created. Because to make it to the end of the maze you have to take a different turn then the one that kept leading you down a dead-end. It might require you to quit your job, or bite down and stay at your job until you can brainstorm something greater. Maybe it means letting go of friends. Or maybe it means being there so unconditionally for friends who were always there for you.
Change is inevitable. It's part of the weather. It runs deep in the seasons, there's no way to avoid it. And for things that will inevitably happen we have to not just get through them, we have to use them to our advantage. Change your situation. Change your perspective. Maybe you're not so much lost as you are stuck. And it's not so much finding your way as it is paving it.