My morning walks are among my greatest joys and have symbolized newfound freedom in my daily life since leaving my corporate career a year ago. I cut through a small opening to the adjacent neighborhood on the other side of a busy thoroughfare, and there, a hidden world opens up. I take in the lush trees, wave to the familiar faces of dogs and their owners, and marvel at the eclectic personalities of the homes – all while trotting alongside the overpopulation of wild peacocks. While much of this walk has become routine after almost a year of meandering the same streets, I make a point to find something new to notice each day. Recently, my effort was rewarded when I spotted a magnificent spiderweb, barely perceptible, stretched between two branches. It was massive, but I would have missed it if I hadn’t glanced up at the perfect time and angle for the sun to illuminate its delicate form.
This got me thinking about what I notice now that I’ve created the time and space – now that I have the apparent freedom to do so. I’ve spent the last year living fuller than ever, experiencing a more comprehensive range of emotions than I imagined possible, mostly because I formerly avoided such extremes by burying myself in busyness. I traversed the depths of grief with the ever-loving plant medicine and the literal high of a hot air balloon floating above the ancient terrain of Cappadocia, Turkey. I embraced my inner child (and mud) playing on the Playa of Burning Man, and I continue to surf the choppy waters of early entrepreneurship. But I’ve realized one central false assumption: leaving my former career path and pursuing these experiences was not the secret to the freedom I longed for. In fact, I am no more free as my own boss than I was reporting to one. This pursuit itself held me captive, spun up in a web of my own making and avoiding the real confrontation: with myself.
It is said that wherever you go, there you are. I could only digest the truth of that statement in the simplicity of being with my breath and body. While my recent adventures have been undeniably enriching to my life, the spaces in between – the moments of silence and solitude – allowed me to get to know myself for the first time. Only there could I see who I am when all the noise is stripped away, and that freedom was always my choice to claim because freedom is who and what I am. I was under the illusion that my persistent feelings of disengagement, lack of fulfillment, and gnawing unease for so many years were caused by something or someone else, and in holding that perspective, I was a victim of my material reality. I lived in the trap that Richard Rudd wisely articulates in his prolific Gene Keys. He says, “Humans look outside themselves when they experience either an emotional high or low. We need to attach a reason to our emotional states. At the high end of the emotional spectrum, we believe that true joy is an effect rather than a cause. Because of this deep-seated belief, we spend most of our lives chasing whatever we think causes the effect of joy – it may be a perfect relationship, lots of money, fame, the perfect place to live, or even our God. At the low end of the emotional spectrum, the game we play is blame. We blame anything from the food we just ate to our partners or the government for the reason we feel bad.” With this inner orientation, we unknowingly imprison ourselves, trapped by our longing for a perpetual state of joy or ecstasy. When we are down, we long to be high, and when we are high, we long to hold onto that feeling. My mission to escape all that I perceived as unfavorable in my life, from jobs to relationships to the pain of loss, only reinforced my own limitation. Leave it to nature to be the greatest reflection of Truth; like the spiderweb, it was barely discernable, but it was always there if I looked from the right angle.
While my love for travel, quest for personal development, and insatiable desire for experiences that challenge my self-definition will likely always be part of my DNA, this last year of constant movement, like my walking route, has brought me back home. Instead of seeing my walks as an effect of breaking free, of having the autonomy to structure my days how I like, they represent an outward expression of my expansiveness and choices about where and how I direct my energy. I can see the endless array of possibilities available to me at all times and, in doing so, slowly disentangle my deep-rooted identification with my own constraints. Today, as I strap on my tennis shoes and set off down my familiar path, I marvel equally at what is newly blossoming outside and what is blossoming inside of me. And all it takes is a simple glance.
“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…” ~Brianna Wiest
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