During this part of my journey - where I have decided to forsake much control, and a salary - I find myself constantly thinking about the fact that I will still have to return to Australia and fulfill obligations to two of my most inspiring cheer-leaders. It is a concern for me because I have taken a 'road less traveled' and I am finding that this journey is like driving at night in an unfamiliar area - you can only see as far as your headlights and there is no ability to fill in beyond that from your past experiences.
One thing that becomes obvious is that there are lots of sign posts pointing you back to the old and familiar path, with a promise of comfort and perhaps security. Those sign posts are very tempting. Do I get off this road and head back to the old life, or even the one I had before that? The old ways of earning a salary to meet my obligations. The temptation is constantly there at this point, and perhaps this is self imposed. Job alerts constantly whisper from your inbox or from your views of your social media. Those whispers are about possibilities based on who you were - not necessarily who you are now. Is this road that I am on the right one? Is it going anywhere? Or could it be a dead end? So many questions abound when you are on a different path to most of the people that you know.
Then occasionally you happen across a fellow traveler of this path. It may be planned or by co-incidence. And when you talk to them they give you hope. They remind you that you are not the person that you previously were and that when you return to your old world, this doesn't mean that you return to the old path. The path is not physical, it is a state of mind. It is the way that you see yourself. The labels that you give yourself and allow others to give to you. The journey might not be across country, but who is to say that the path that you take is not going to crisscross the old one, not necessarily because you are not going in a straight line, but because that old path was built to give you multiple options to jump onto this one. The sliding doors moments - perhaps they happen all the time.
And what of the money? I think that there is little doubt that sufficient to meet obligations is required. One of those fellow travelers happening across my path has relayed stories of the way that the universe provided for her on her physical return. Her faith that it will be ok was encouraging, but as the Islamic proverb says - trust in god but first tie up your camel. It is probably not enough to have blind faith. I am sure there is more that I am supposed to be doing to ensure that I am prepared to accept what the universe is carving out for me. By the same token, it is not a good idea to over think this tying up of the camel - you do not need to create a Gordian Knot. (The upside is that should you inadvertently do that, the answer to the knot is still simple).
Instead, I will do the things I need to do to silence the distracting whispers. I will start tending to the seeds of personal growth that I have left planted but not watered for some time. I will sever some lazy ties that are weighing me down. And I will keep on walking the path - remember I am on it as a consequence of decisions that I made. I have to own those. Walking the path until it bears back to the ones I love is the only way, short of making new decisions with other consequences, to get full value for the experience my original decisions set out to earn me. And that experience is the seconds of this journey - not something that I have bought, but something that I have earned. But it is earned the slow way - one second at a time.
The title to today's post comes from Avenger's Endgame - not sure if I have phrased it exactly as spoken, but it was courtesy of Tony Stark.
