If I had to pinpoint one of the things that have been most heavy on my mind lately, in my personal journey, it's just that.
The murmurs and echoes around you tell more than you're at first willing to hear.
I'm someone with a fairly anxious disposition. I want a lot. I wanna know where I'm going. How. Why. When, exactly. And I feel this pressure that it's all on my shoulders. Ownership means a lot to me, and I always remind myself that I am in the driver's seat of my life. Subsequently, if I fail to get places, it's on me, and strong as I am, the pressure mounts up, and I occasionally find myself caving under it.
So lately, I've been taking a detour from that.
I've been paying attention less to the chatter in my head, and more to the murmurs around me. The echoes, as I think of them. Seeing what life is pushing me towards. Because see, you can make a decision in your head, and if you're really sure it's what you want, that's really fortunate. Full speed ahead.
But sometimes, quite often, we'll make decisions due not to certainty, but to societal pressure, peer advice, anxiety, and all sorts of tertiary factors that shouldn't weigh on our decision-making at all. In other words, we force things.
The trouble with things is that they get forced.
If you push hard enough, it will break. Everything will, eventually. Which is why you wanna think twice before you push, lest you find you've bent it into the wrong shape. Your life. It is your life.
For now, I'm pushing less and listening more. I'm letting go of the things I think I want (or should want) and being more mindful of how life steers me. For someone as dependent on my own accountability, it's no picnic. When it gets hard, I think of my yoga. There are poses I want that I can push myself into and hold, if I force it. But those poses aren't always what my body needs, what it's telling me to shape myself into. And forcing the wrong pose may cause my back to break.
That is worth remembering.
I find myself in a place of uncertainty, so I let the echoes tell me.
I wasn't sure I wanted to continue dancing. I felt so lost in a "I dunno" phase that I literally couldn't decide, so avoided a decision. Then my dancing instructor texted out of the blue, and I took that for a sign.
Are there signs? I dunno, but for now, I'm trusting myself a bit to external factors. To "maybe we should do this". To letting the echoes decide for a bit because the strain of being in the driver's seat 100% of the time is getting to me.
Where do I wanna be in 6 months? That's a loaded question for me. Here, but also not here. So I've got my ear to the echoes, and weirdly enough, against all expectation, I'm finding answers. Answers along the lines of "don't go to X place", and "there's a future in which you are in Y place, specifically". Is that the unconscious? Again, I don't know.
It turns out, there are answers floating around me to questions I never dared ask out loud. And where I am right now, I'm thinking it may be dangerous and foolhardy to ignore them.
