08. Forge the new road
Paths we choose, life and growth.
“Forge the new road. Others will question it and doubt it. But that path will eventually come to fit your soul. It will not only lead you into deeper parts of your craft, but to hidden parts of yourself.” - Brian Collins.
You can apply this to anything you like really. Work, personal projects, relationships and friendships or even the relationship you have with yourself. What I’ve come to learn is that we think that we can either choose to follow someone else’s path or we can forge our own, when in reality, as we follow someone else’s footsteps they instantly become our own anyway. Imagine that you’re walking along a beach treading on the footsteps someone in front of you has left behind as they were walking. As soon as you place your foot on top, you leave your own mark. Whatever you touch becomes yours and we very often mistake the idea that we need to create from zero for it to be our own.
Whatever path we walk down inevitably is our path and it’s always taking us *somewhere*, we never roam randomly with no purpose. Just because we have no idea what the purpose is yet doesn't mean that it’s meaningless. Steve Jobs once said “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” And they will. I’ve been forging a path for the last four months and I’m still not sure where it’s taking me. I see myself acting different and feeling different but the “why” to it all is hidden deep inside of me. I’ve been digging like crazy trying to find this hidden seed that I thought would give me all of the answers, but it hasn’t and I don’t think it will. I can’t connect the dots further back enough to see it all clearly yet but in my heart I know that everything that I’m doing, the changes I’m feeling, the books I’m finding, the people I’m meeting and those I’m leaving behind are all dots that are slowly connecting on their own.
As the inicial quote says “Others will question it and doubt it. But that path will eventually come to fit your soul.” There are probably a few people questioning my behaviour and expecting answers but the truth is that I can’t give it to them because even I don’t know the answers. The difference is that I’m learning to stop looking for answers and explanations and just carry on. I trust that time will sort things out and will provide explanations to those who need them, including myself. And this will form more dots that will make my path fit with my soul. This to me represents tranquility, peace, equilibrium, happiness and stability in my inner being.
We are all constantly changing day by day. Every hour, every minute and every second we make decisions inside our heads and we convince ourselves that what we have decided is the best decision because of x, y and z reasons. In reality, we have no idea what these choices are going to bring us further down the line. Regardless of that, I think that we subconsciously always make, what is, the best decision we could have made at that moment in time. Let’s not get too hung up on the details. We’re not going to be able to connect all of the dots yet and we don’t actually need to. Society tends to have this rather bizarre idea that if we change our minds we aren’t responsible or reliable people. When in reality I (personally) think that it’s healthy to be able to leave an old habit or idea behind and move on to new things. It shows that you are open minded, flexible and able to grow.
The more we walk down these different paths known as life, the more things we try to do, the more we fail and succeed, the more we learn and discover, the closer we will be to finding our deeply hidden parts. I’ve seen mechanical engineers flourish as artists, basketball players grow into graphic designers, forensic scientists become scared of dead bodies and discover their love for writing, nurses become doctors, teenage gamers become incredible game developers, musicians become software programmers… No one knows what they selected when they turned the video game on, pressed start and then pressed “select character” but the more you play, the more lost you get down the windy paths, the better you’ll get to know your character along with the different characters and the easier it will be for you to say “I’m fed up with being an alien, let’s see what the game’s like when you play as a predator”.
Thank you for being here for another week
📬 If you enjoyed it, share it with someone or press like ❤️
💬 Answer this email or leave a comment if you have something you’d like to say, I’ll always reply!
See you next week,
Ejjjjjjhd.