“For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” ~ Ecclesiastes 3:1
I’m about to take off on a grand adventure, something that I’ve basically wanted to do my whole life: to travel around the world, indefinitely. To make travel my life. I wish it could have happened earlier, but apparently that wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
One of the hardest things in life is to wait, but unfortunately we can’t force the timing we want through sheer will and longing. As Byron Katie says, “When we argue with reality, we lose…. but only 100% of the time.”
I see this for my daughter right now too. She’s looking for a new job, and it’s scary not knowing if it will be one month or six, or longer, before she finds one. There’s a popular saying: Leap, and the net will appear. I believe this is true, but you never know how long the free fall is going to be before it does.
Not knowing: the ego hates that.
Not having control: even worse.
But this is what life demands of us. It’s keeping the dream alive, doing what we can to forward it, but still living the life we are actually given, with grace and gratitude, no matter how different it looks from what we want.
And now that my dream is about to come true, it’s actually a bit terrifying! But that is also something life demands – there’s no moving forward without loss of some kind. Loss of what is comfortable and familiar. Relationships that change form. Even loss of our illusions about the dream, because it’s never exactly the way we imagined it.
And ironically, the not knowing and not having control continue, even with the dream. There’s never a time when it’s all sewn up in a tidy bundle with no loose strings. At least, not until we die, I guess!
So I’m going to head off, first to Hawaii and Bali, then to Mexico and Central America, and lots more places after that. It will be scary and lonely and exhilarating, and probably far different from what I dreamed of all those years. Maybe I will even hate it – who knows? I am a very different person now, at 58, than I was at 28. But I’ve learned a lot about dealing with not knowing and not having control, so I think I’ll be okay.
It’s my time now.
To learn more about navigating through life and creating your future with purpose see: How to Discover and Live Your Purpose
