“If you don’t stand still long enough to ask the hard questions, you’ll spend your life chasing the wrong answers,” unknown.  Most of us follow the same routine day in and day out, never really stopping to think about the why behind what we’re doing.  It’s what we are told to do, it’s what we are told the norm is.  We are told we are supposed to get work, to do a job, to work hard and often and produce and be productive in order to earn a life.  The reality is we consider making a living actually living.  The point of a living is to be able to live, not to get stuck in a pattern that sucks up our time and gives no meaning to life.  The fact we are alive doesn’t mean we are living—there is the phrase that says don’t live the same day for 91 years and call it living.  If we don’t take the time to ask if what we are doing gives us joy, gives us meaning, brings us peace and makes us FEEL good, then we will never know the value of our own time.  We will never know the real answer we need is.  We can’t know who we are if we are living someone else’s version of our lives.  

It is a hard question to ask.  It’s an even more difficult answer to hear.  And if we are brave enough to ask and then hear the truth, it can be an even more difficult pill to swallow.  We can create a beautiful life we feel no love or attachment for if we don’t ask ourselves the truth of who we are.  It can be by anyone’s definition successful and lovely but it can have no meaning if it has no meaning to us.  We never look at the   There comes a time when activity is just about activity—it isn’t about progress.  Movement for the sake of movement has its purpose, time, context.  But if we live our lives like that there is no way to gauge if we’ve moved the needle because we aren’t even sure where the needle is let alone where it’s pointing—and there’s certainly no way to tell where we need it to point.  We don’t want to ask the questions because we fear the implications if we get something wrong, if we have to start over. The things worth doing we would do over and over again regardless, and if we fear having to repeat the steps then we need to ask ourselves if what we’re doing is what we want to be doing—that in itself is a hard question.

We may not want to face the idea of starting over or readjusting or having to repeat an action, but if we don’t, we face larger problems down the line.  We lose opportunity to fix things if we don’t address an issue from the beginning.  The longer we ignore if something doesn’t feel right or if we’re not doing something right, the more difficult it is to change course down the line.  And if we never stop to ask, we can end up at the very end and miss the entire opportunity to do something we loved.  Facing the truth and course correcting is easier than carrying the burden of regret.  The goal isn’t perfection, it isn’t about getting everything right the first time—it’s about getting it right for us.  Sometimes we feel like we can’t stop, like there’s too much going on, like there’s so much happening that we can’t pause.  But how much we get done doesn’t matter if we’re going in the wrong direction.  So take the time to ask the question and be brave enough to listen and follow the answer—we’ve known it all along.