“I can’t see my way through.; Can you see your next step?; Yes.; Then just take that,”  The Boy, The Mole, The Fox, and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy.  Ironic that this particular quote found me right after talking about the clarity of passion.  I approached my entire life with a certain level of timidity, afraid of ruining something to the point where I couldn’t fix it.  I kind of treated it like a video game on my last life: I knew there was no going back and no do-overs.  It led to fear because that meant I wanted to get it perfect on the first go around.  I didn’t understand this lesson, this concept of following what felt good or interested us, of exploring curiosity like I do now.  I thought those were things you did once you “made it.”  I didn’t see that you could follow those things as a means to make it.  I didn’t understand that sometimes you just needed to take that first step as a means to figure out the rest—I thought you needed to see each step in between, like life was entirely choreographed for us and we needed to figure out the routine.  I fell very easily into routine—it felt good.  And that feeling good was the trap—it was my mistake to believe that any routine was good rather than finding one that worked for me.  I didn’t even know that creating my own routine was a possibility.   

I initially heard this quote in the context of overthinkers the other day, but I feel like this is appropriate to finding our passion as we discussed yesterday.  Sometimes all we can do is take the next step, whether we find ourselves stopped because we are confused or afraid or something hasn’t worked out.  I understand the ebbs and flows of life, believe me.  We all have ups and downs.  It’s when we take the next step toward what feels right that we learn what feels right—as we’ve talked about many times, we become what we need to be by becoming what we need to be.  We simply have to “do.”  Waiting for things to happen will only leave us wanting and waiting.  Taking those simple steps, even if we don’t see the end, is far more productive than doing nothing.  At least with taking steps we see options.  We can always turn around or take another path or even create another path if we need to.  We can take a break and gather our bearings—and there are times we will have to do just that.  Life isn’t always easy, we have extreme highs and lows but the majority of our time is spent on the middle ground.  From there we can find the thing that sparks us and drives us to that uncontrollable emotion, and once we find that, the extraneous ignites and the entire path is clear.

Taking the next step is key in influencing the course of our lives.  It’s key in creation, not just of our lives, but in the sphere of those around us and how big that sphere can be.  Not every step will be perfect—there will be wrong turns that make it feel like we are at a dead end or drove off a cliff.  Then there are the turns that reveal the most beautiful expanses we have ever seen, like the entire world is laid out before us and we understand how we are simultaneously so small but so big in our influence.  We see our little place in this world and how important that place really is.  There are no mistakes, there are no accidents, and there are no coincidences.  We are exactly where we need to be, and  when we are lost, all we need to do is ask ourselves what feels right, what the next right step is.  We know.  We always know and we just need to remind ourselves of that.  We can trust that passion, that curiosity to guide us through the darkest of times.  Even if we do fall off the cliff, we see we can go in another direction—or sometimes what we thought was the bottom of the hill is the start of something much greater.  Let the passion guide us and show the way.  The universe never steers us wrong.  We always have a choice in what we do—let that choice be made of what feels right to us.