Your Messy Life

As I coach people, one thing comes up again and again.  Their lives are messy and it’s driving them nuts.  They’re desperate to get on “the path” – the linear, predictable steady ascent that ends up on the summit of peace, love, riches, happiness, success and Netflix.  They see their friends on Instagram always at swanky restaurants, Ibiza, or Burning Man and feel small and insignificant by comparison.  The breaking news I have for them involves two deep truths:

• Social media is a fake world of fantasy, posturing, and signaling. It has no basis in how anyone actually lives their life.
• The only real path is life is the pathless path.

And the pathless path includes detours, canyons, mountains to climb, rivers (or oceans) to transverse, speed bumps, and dead ends.  Which is a metaphorical way to say that the journey to contentment is a herky-jerky, fits & starts process.  You’re going to experience defeats and victories, positive and negative, births and deaths.

No one actually has that straight, clear and continuous ascent that social media would lead you to believe.  Everyone is on the pathless path with uncertainties, contradictions, and confusions.  But once you recognize that and not only accept this but celebrate this – your life can truly begin.

You don’t have to have it all figured out.  No one does.  Not Warren Buffet, Oprah, or the happiest, successful person you want to be like.

Stop looking for certainty. Celebrate the uncertainly.  Dance with your fear.  And enjoy your journey along the pathless path.

-RG