The more you search, the more you will discover. But you must understand that discovery will change you.
What do we do when we no long feel as if we fit in?
For most of my life I felt as if I was searching for something. As a young boy I ‘felt’ a great deal of the environment within which I lived. I felt the people around me and the changes in their mood, I felt the energy in a room as I sat in it, surrounded by others, or totally alone, and above all I felt, right in the very heart of me, something unknowable calling to me.
As I progressed into my teens I felt this calling getting stronger and more persistent. It became the main voice in my life, the main focus. But the challenge for me was not to listen to what it was saying but rather to understand what it meant.
Much later in life I came to realise that my challenge was not that I couldn’t understand the calling, but that I wasn’t prepared to believe I had a choice, either in where my life was going or how I lived it.
For many of us an imposed sense of obligation is the very thing that stifles every creative endeavour we ever dreamed of exploring. We sacrifice what we truly need in order to avoid the disappointment of others, the judgement of others, the prejudice of others. If we are very lucky we don’t allow this to be a barrier between us and our life’s goals, but for many the weight of the collective expectation is far too great to ignore; work hard at school, go to university, get a well paid job, meet a partner, buy a house, have children, accrue a pension, retire, watch the grandchildren grow, die and leave the kind of legacy that your children won’t be shamed by when sharing your ‘achievements’ with people they know, who didn’t ever know you in the first place.
These are the ‘values’ of our society. And they are as empty as the promises we made to ourselves when we were children; that we would never allow ourselves to be unhappy, or to make others unhappy.
This road map is a road map of ignorance, because it utterly excludes the discovery of our higher purpose, and without a higher purpose we are all just sitting on the dock of life, watching the ships sail by, and wondering what it would look like to be at the other end of their journey.
Life is not a ladder, to be climbed one rung at a time. It is an ocean to be sailed. Dangerous at times, lonely at times, but filled, not only with endless self-discovery, but with everything we will ever need to nurture us, and a million destinations that can take our breath away and transform us from what we are into what we are meant to be.
The world I was taught to grow up in is a hologram of sorts. That is to say: a projection of collective expectation, aimed towards a collective goal. But not towards my goal.
I struggled, as a kid, to find a path that not only made sense to me, but also to my parents, my tutors and my friends. In the end, because I couldn’t find a profession that inspired me, I was labelled a dreamer by most, a slacker by some and a drifter by everyone else. “He lacks direction” was a phrase I became used to hearing, with regard to my life choices.
And yet, if someone had asked me, I would have told them that the reason for my apparent indecision was because nothing I was being offered nurtured me. If I had been asked at 13 years old what I wanted to ‘be’ when I left school I would have said “a chef”. If you’d have asked me again at 17 I’d have said “a journalist” and if you’d asked me at 20 I’d have said “I’ve no idea”.
At 44 I sit here and, perhaps for the first time, understand that what I really ‘needed’ hadn’t emerged into the world at that point. What I really needed was for somebody to understand and to express to me the fact that life is a wondrous, spiritual journey, filled with lessons that are designed to reveal our true potential.
If someone had explained that to me, I would have gone at life with a fierce enthusiasm. Instead, the goal driven path that I was taught to follow left me empty and unfulfilled.
So, what does all of this mean to a person who feels as if they don’t fit in? It means that the scope of your vision has been inhibited by the expectations of others.
You are limitless, and there is very little in life that is impossible to you. The key is to realign your expectations and be truthful with yourself about what you really need in order to feel alive. Leave the others to their goals, but don’t mistake what they need for what you need.