There is something soothing and restorative that happens when you can look across your life and experience a profound appreciation for the blessings, the gifts and the miracles present in your life. When you can look back and be grateful for the broken road that led you to this moment. When you can feel a sense of peace and calm as you think about where you are versus where you’ve been. Because you’ve made it—you have a solid relationship, a thriving family, a stable job, a dear friend, a beautiful home, a community that lifts you.
But what happens when those things no longer fulfill you? What happens when you are living the life you’ve always dreamed of and one day you wake up feeling like it’s not enough? You have this nagging feeling of a growing void, a tiny pit in your stomach slowly expanding. At first, you ignore it but gradually you are becoming twitchy, discontent, irritable, uneasy and you can’t figure out why.
You are conditioned to numb the pain, dismiss the warning signs in your body and mask your underlying emotions because society says you have enough…more than enough! That you should be happy and content and blissful because you are living the American dream after all. You launch an internal campaign of performative gratitude saying things like, “I’m grateful to have someone who loves me” when that someone consistently falls short or “I’m grateful to have a job” when you are woefully overworked and underpaid. You use forced gratitude to cover up your pain, hide the emptiness and subdue the aching.
Where is the balance between being content and realizing our deepest desires?
Between being fulfilled but longing for more?
Between good enough and true, unfiltered happiness?
The path to reaching our most fulfilled and happiest life happens when we remember that there is no landing page, no point of arrival. Life is not intended to be achieved and then stagnated. Not everything is meant to come into our lives and stay forever. Jobs, relationships, friendships, hobbies, passions and fears are meant to flow through us like a river—constantly weaving in and out bringing us gifts of joy, lessons to prepare us, moments of extraordinary bliss, pain that expands us and experiences that broaden our perspectives and strengthen our wisdom.
Embracing the seasons as they come can guide us to our most rewarding life. It’s the ever-changing cycles of life that serve to give us exactly what we need when we need it. When we force life to fit in a box, to move in a straight line, to be linear and controlled we leave our souls feeling malnourished and suffocated and begging for more. But when we allow our energy to be dynamic and free flowing, we create space to hear the whispers and illuminate the path in front of us.
As the seasons change, some things will naturally leave us, some things will transition and grow with us and some things we must choose to leave behind. But choosing to leave that something behind, something you once loved and cherished, can bring an unbearable pain. The kind of pain where just the mere thought of it takes your breath away. Fear consumes your being leaving you paralyzed. And even though you know in your heart that it’s time to move on, that you are ready for more, that it no longer serves you, you accept your discomfort and the feeling of ‘good enough’ to avoid the greater pain. You anchor to the idea that it will get so much worse before it gets better and convince yourself that you don’t have the stamina or grit to survive the suck. You tell yourself it’s a gamble, that the More + Better + Different you’re seeking isn’t even a guarantee, so you remain frozen in time believing this is as good as it gets.
You make a conscious decision to carry it forward like shackles attached to your feet, dragging it behind you with every step, praying it will catch up and someday walk beside you again. But the void you feel—that pit in your stomach—won’t go away. It’s growing every day and you slowly become consumed by the tug of war happening between your heart and mind. In the deepest parts of your soul there is a desperate feeling of being ready to expand and blossom, a growing eagerness to explore the unknown, but the sacrifice it would take to get there leaves you stopped dead in your tracks.
Why do we choose to hurt ourselves before hurting others?
Why do we sacrifice our own needs for the sake of consistency and stability?
Why do we fear change and loss more than we value our self-worth?
Why do we fear the unknown even though we’ve conquered it a thousand times before?
It’s easy to lose our identity in the things we are holding on to—the relationship, the high-paying job, the friendship, the big house, the fancy car, the sexy hobby. We’ve created an attachment so deep we can’t even see ourselves anymore. Losing that thing begins to feel like something will be cut out of us, like a limb or a vital organ, and we believe it’s something we can’t live without. When really, we are whole without it. We always have been. It was not meant to complete us, it was meant to compliment us.
When we hold on too tightly, we lose the natural flow of life. We miss out on opportunities for new experiences, new beginnings, new joys. When we hunker down on the shore, clinging to a singular moment in time, we become stagnant, inflexible and stubborn. We train ourselves to skillfully ignore the whispers gently telling us it’s time to go, time to move on.
Life is meant to be full of new chapters, a constant cycle of endings and beginnings, a never-ending story. Instead of playing it like an old movie on repeat, what if we reflect on and honor what that chapter brought us? How it saved us, how it was the best chapter yet, how we can’t imagine our story without it, how it was exactly what we needed at that moment in time, how it nourished us, healed us and restored us. Then, with gratitude, write the ending to the chapter.
We release it, let it go, set it free. We choose the pursuit of joy over the ache of discomfort. We give our fears permission to walk beside us as we embark into the unknown. We create space to let what is meant to be unfold. We accept that not everything and everyone is meant to be in our lives forever. We remember that the only constant in our story is the person staring back at us in the mirror. We get honest about our longings and embrace the crossroads as a new adventure. We commit to the constant practice of evolution and invite change to be our guide. We fall in love with being the author of our story and starring as the main character. We never stop dreaming. And we choose ourselves over and over and over again.
“We must continually outgrow who we have been in order to continually develop into who we were created to become.” – Unknown
A Must Read
Alex Elle’s post on Quitting…It needs to be an option. In her post she shares these affirmations:
I am grateful that I'm learning what I no longer want.
I am open to releasing what is no longer in alignment.
I am grateful for the reroutes.
I am aligned with my highest good.
I am living with intention and self-trust.
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