When I was young I thought there was a path in life I was supposed to find. Lacking information, I felt frustrated and lost. Here are a few thoughts for any who similarly find themselves floundering for a way through life’s fog.
First of all, realize that metaphors like “path” can be a part of the problem. The metaphor of life as a journey can make us feel we are currently in the wrong spot and need to grope our way to something better. We can only start where we are. In a sense, the journey is always to here and now.
The point of metaphors is to give us insights about living. Religion becomes a serious problem if we ever come to believe in our symbols are ends in themselves. By studying various cultures we can learn the difference between our vessels for understanding and the lives we seek to live.
Beware of any teacher who only knows one path. It is almost guaranteed they will assume what has been helpful to them will be helpful to you. A good teacher will be like an eye doctor trying different lenses to find which produces clarity of vision for YOU. Instead of trying to sell their own understanding, a good teacher will help us try on different metaphors and symbols to discover what is illuminating of YOUR experience. They will seek to deepen our awareness not to convert us to THEIR understanding.
Returning to our metaphor of life as a journey, we begin with our first insight: “We can only start where we are and with who we are.” Perhaps the most helpful advice I have ever found on the subject was the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. Patanjali is the person credited with the development of Yoga. He said, “Yoga is stilling the fluctuations of the mind. Then the seer abides in itself, resting in its true nature. Otherwise we identify with the fluctuations.”
I hear those words as saying that spiritual practice begins with listening, not speaking or acting. Whatever practice we employ should settle us down into an awareness of where our nature expresses nature itself. Whereas, we usually identify with thoughts and feelings, it can be enormously helpful to discover the deeper part of ourselves that is observing those “fluctuations.”
After we are looking out from our own center it can be helpful to contemplate what practices have been helpful along the way. No one outside of us can replace this particular work. Anyone who proposes their own path before listening to us is not a teacher we can trust. Helpful teachers listen first. They are not trying to convert or enlighten us but to bring us to our own center. They may help us remember what has “watered our seed” in the past. They may help us explore what has made our horizon larger and our world richer, but a loving teacher will never tell us what to do or think. Instead, they will play the caddy to our Tiger Woods.
Then, as we settle into who we really are, we become aware that we are expressions of something larger and deeper. We do not exist by and for ourselves alone. The Christian theologian Frederick Buechner had a helpful phrase. He said our life’s vocation is found at the place where “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
We must not seek some kinds of truth generically. There is a sense in which our common life can only be explored through the lens of our personal lives. We are continually opening to the universal, but a part can never know the whole without dissolving into something bigger than itself.
The third insight is to turn our life into a gift. We are all going to die and return to the ground out of which we have emanated. Our only choice is whether to die of something or for something.
It can be helpful to consider how to joyfully and lovingly give ourselves back to the common life. The impermanence of life means that faith is not holding onto belief or even to life itself. Faith is letting go of EVERYTHING and trusting that the wave can only go back to the ocean that has given it birth.
Hunter S. Thompson said it well I think:
“LIfe’s Journey is not to arrive at the grave safely, in a well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, totally worn out, shouting “Holy S***, what a ride!”
So in summary:
If we are feeling lost, any path we chose should bring us to our own center. It should allow us to look out through your own eyes and feel through our own skin.
Then, we should travel our path in a way that enlarges our horizons and helps us experience other people, animals and plants as our one larger life.
And then, we might let our experience of that larger life transform our personal journey into a gift so joyfully and loving given that even our death becomes a fireworks celebration of life.