Feeling lost is a great starting point
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
Are you secretly feeling disappointed with the way your life has turned out, although objectively, you have achieved almost everything you have spent years striving for? You have built your career, step by step, thanks to your hard work and dedication. You used to enjoy your job and felt truly driven, but now you feel your drive slowly disappearing over the years, and you start to panic. Is this all there is?
Maybe you catch yourself feeling jealous of your cat because she does not need to turn on her computer every morning. Perhaps you see a gardener slowly cutting tree branches in the park, and you think: “What a nice, simple life! I wish I was happy with less!”.
If you feel lost right now, maybe it’s not because you have been doing something wrong. Perhaps it’s because you did everything right, but according to other people’s expectations, not yours.
Every human being longs for a sense of higher purpose. But there is no universal path towards fulfilment – because every person is unique. That’s why following a “traditional, safe” way in life might work well for some. But for most people, some genuine soul-searching might be needed to design a life path that suits them and enables them to use their real strengths and feel their purpose.
This does not necessarily mean they will need to start their lives over from scratch. What it takes to create a sustainable life is to begin genuinely embracing who they are, what they already have and start using it towards making the impact that makes clear sense to them.
Or, in other words, allowing themselves to be the person who they always were. But this time, believing that they are enough, that the combination of their talents and strengths can be useful and that wanting to live a different life is not naive but rather natural.
So if you feel lost right now, maybe it’s a sign that deep down, you are tired of fulfilling other people’s expectations, and you are ready to explore how YOU would like your life to look. It’s never too late to do that. And in a world where the “normal” and “safe” life path seems to be pretty much predefined, the only strength that is truly essential to embark on this path is courage.
Originally posted on June 15, 2022