Have you ever looked at your life and asked, “What happened? How did I get here?” Of course there are times when we are where we intended to be and know how we got there. Not so often I think. Our life journey is often more like when we drive to a destination and don’t remember the time between our departure and our arrival. Or other times we clearly head in a direction and get distracted with side trips along the way.

What’s great about waking up to where we are and asking ourselves how we got there is that hindsight can be 20/20 vision. If we are honest with ourselves we can see we set it up. We did it. After all as the Teaching says, We are Cause (with a capital C). And more importantly, there is a good possibility that we knew what we were doing from a Higher Consciousness perspective. Sometimes we didn’t and we have some regrets, which to me is a waste of time.

Often when we look at where we are it is accompanied by some idea of where the world thinks we should be. There’s this whisper from the world at large about what is right, wrong, success or failure regarding any given stage in our lives. I think listening to that is also a waste of time. Life consists of an endless series of adjustments. Living fully, like driving well requires we keep our hands on the wheel and be alert. The journey is rarely what we expected, at times even difficult to understand.

I like what retired surgeon and author, Bernie Siegel says. “If you think your path in life must be logical, then you are path-o-logical.” As usual, Dr. Siegel makes a great point and makes me smile. I can relate.

Everything I had planned for my life when I was much younger, loose as it was, has turned out very differently. The good news is that I am happy about it. All those unexpected places I ended up in seem to have molded me, prepared me for where I was supposed to be all along.

Perhaps it’s normal for us to realize our lives are different than what we thought it would be; sometimes we are pleased and sometimes not. We’re usually not drawn to that reflecting until we are about thirty years old. Coming to grips with things being different and even being temporarily disappointed is a Life Passage. Being absolutely okay with where we are and being okay with the choices we have made for ourselves is a sign of Self-Mastery.

If we end up where we did not intend, we get another GPS direction and start making corrections. Recalibrate. And while we are at it, it’s smart to look around and see what we could have missed had we not ended up where we thought we didn’t want to be. Who knows, maybe we had to be where we didn’t want to be in order to get to where we intended. Any journey worth taking is full of surprises.

May We All Walk in Beauty

QUOTE:

“ A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it. ”
~ Jean de La Fontaine, French Poet and Fabulist, 17th Century