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When you do not know what is next, you enter the realm of infinite potential.
One day you will realize that happiness is not what your house looks like, but how you love the people within its walls. Happiness is not finding success by a certain time, but finding something you love so much time itself seems to disappear. Happiness is not thinking you have earned the world’s approval, but waking up each day and feeling so at peace within your own skin, quietly anticipating the day ahead, unconcerned with how you are perceived.
You may believe that living life to the fullest is seeing every country in the world and quitting your job on a whim and falling recklessly in love, but it’s really just knowing how to be where your feet are. It’s learning how to take care of yourself, how to make a home within your own skin. It’s learning how to build a simple life you are proud of. A life most fully lived is not always composed of the things that rock you awake, but those that slowly assure you it’s okay to slow down. That you don’t always have to prove yourself. That you don’t need to fight forever, or constantly want more.
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Move toward the people who expand your perimeter of possibility, who believe in your potential just a little bit more than your reality. Move toward the people who remind you of the person you know you’re meant to be, the ones who stretch your soul and make you feel something real. Move toward the people who remind you of what you contain, who help you fall a little more in love with life. Move toward the people who energize you more than they drain you. These little signs are not so little—they are the markers of our soulmates, in all the forms they come.
Maybe you should trust the missed connections, the calls gone unanswered, the opportunities that had every reason to work out but didn’t. Maybe you should trust in the small signs before they become big ones. Maybe you should trust those tiny contractions, the nights that exhaust you and the people who don’t see you and the places that make you feel that subtle uneasiness. Maybe you should learn to trust in what passes you by so you’ll begin to trust in what lands right in front of you. Maybe you should trust that in what isn’t working, because it might be trying to guide you to what will.
Nurture and engage in the most stunning aspects of yourself, give the majority of your time to your greatest strengths. You are not here to simply compensate for your weaknesses, to level yourself out in every possible direction. You are not here to grow the parts of you that were never destined to come fully into form.
Kindness is evidence of impenetrable strength. It is the willingness to stay soft in a world that tries to harden you at every corner. It is the ability to absorb your own emotions and diffuse them, to decide what you want to act on and what you want to put back out into the world, regardless of what the world has put you through. Kind people are not just good, they are heroes in their own ways. Their ability to not reciprocate unkindness to a world that often deserves it makes them catalysts for the deepest healing to occur.
You are the peace between the highs and the lows, the sky that rests forever behind whatever storms may form and release themselves in time. You’ll always return to what you really are, you will always come back to your truth. If there is anything greater than happiness, it is coming to this realization and living with this knowledge. You are all that is steady and safe within you.
I hope you learn to live in a way that makes you glad to be alive. Not glad for your elevator speech, your accolades, or what you believe the world sees you as. Not where you are glad for all that you might do one day, but the beauty with which you experience the smallest and most unassuming of things. I hope you learn to live in a way that makes you excited for the day ahead, for whatever it is you are meant to do with this period of time, with this corner of the world, with this one body and life that is yours. I hope you learn to experience living, instead of just imagining how your life is
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to see that you cannot see everything, and so begins the true journey of your life, which is the dance between what is yours to handle and what is yours to release.
Eventually, you will have to stop pouring yourself into the things that will give nothing back, that take without any intent to give. You will have to stop trying to make yourself fit into places you are no longer meant to be. If you are going to give your energy to anything, give it to what’s already working. To the people who already love you, to the things that show potential, to the places that make you feel more alive.
...and when you realize it's not about trying harder and harder to make those work. Be you and watch the energy soar.
You will move forward with more mindfulness. You will begin to see that when your energy is leaking out into a thousand different directions, you cannot fully invest your own potential.
You will begin to see that it was never about whether or not you were capable of becoming what you most desire, but that you were simply distracted, unknowingly surrounded by those who infused a sense of disbelief so deeply into your subconscious mind, self-limiting beliefs became the parameters in which you thought you had to experience this world. You will begin to decide what really matters to you, what you actually want to experience while you are alive, and gently, and lovingly, release the rest in time.
You are here to carve a new way out of the unknown. You are here to defy what’s expected and create a new normal, one where you feel inherently free to not see external challenges as absolute dead-ends, but to discover the quiet resilience you cultivate as you work your way around them. You are here to nurture the feeling a life most fully lived would give you in your chest, not what you imagine it would appear in someone else’s eyes.
Instead of thinking of every one of your qualities as fixed, consider that your environment and the structure of your day evoke different emotional states and, with consistency, can begin to appear on the surface as unmovable aspects of who you are. What is happening around you when you are the most peaceful, open-minded, inspired version of yourself? What is happening when you are not? Is it possible that healing could look like making the smallest amendments and seeing how wide their effects might ricochet?
You become who you really are when you start choosing the things that you actually find meaningful and worthwhile. You become who you really are when even the most minor decisions throughout your day reflect your authenticity, when your instinct leads you before your mind interrupts. You become who you really are when you start allowing the brightest parts of you to shine without apology, when you begin to realize there is no substitute for your own love finally flowing through your own life.
Do you know how many perfect moments are unfolding before your very eyes? Do you know how much you already have? Do you know how many quiet nights of peace you have already experienced, how many hearts have loved you, how many people would love to see your name pop up on their phone right now? Do you know how much you matter? Do you know how good you are?
It is easy to tell how you are doing in life. When you go outside, how beautiful is the flower? That is how you know.
Nothing is wrong with you. You are supposed to have days in which you are so self-assured followed by nights where you gaze into the sky and wonder if this is all there is. You are supposed to have years that feel like weeks and weeks that feel like years. You are supposed to get rejected sometimes. You are supposed to have people disagree with you at times. You are supposed to be a little lost now and again. You are not supposed to have all of the answers. Nothing is wrong with you.
You will not truly feel settled until you have done what you came here to do. Until you have reached into yourself and pulled out the most glimmering thing about you, and held it up for the world to see. Until you have completed the work that only you could do, in only the way that you can do it. Until you have made your gifts into an offering. Until you have stopped trying to live up to some ancient concept of perfection, but instead seek the radiating fullness of a life devoted to that which you alone are most suited for, what you alone are most destined to complete.
