After all the many miles and countless challenges I have faced to get where I was going, the farther along I got on my way, the more the same two lessons kept surprising me again and again. The first is how I was never overcoming trials and obstacles, I was always simply overcoming myself. The second turned out to be my own voice of grace and wisdom asking me how gracefully I might return to this simple understanding time and again and how quickly I might remember that I was always struggling along my own story.
As always, this post is an invitation to slow down and be really present. If we don’t reset our state of presence, we allow the weight and intrusions of the previous moments in our day, to overshadow this one, and rob it of its gifts. Presence is what deepens connection and connection is what deepens meaning.
I am writing this in the hopes that it will touch you—because my heart has been touched, so deeply by a sense of empathy for people who are feeling lost right now. There are young friends, and some old in years but still young of heart, reaching out to me, even some strangers in that we have not met, and may never, but so familiar in that their torments were once my own and their aching questions and uncertainties, the same words that I carried in my troubled heart, across so many broken miles of my journey.
I am writing this to tell you one thing: One day you will appreciate where you are now.
One day you will understand that the journey you are on could never have played out any other way and that if it had, you would not be you. If you value who you are, and you will, you will value the journey and the hard lessons that it took to become someone you can deeply value and respect.
We all share a common prayer. You might be more comfortable with words like intention, or hope, or dream, but if you carry that intention with you and if it takes up room in your heart wherever you go, and airtime in your mind every day, we might as well call it prayer. The prayer is to be whole and to be home: to feel like we are complete and fulfilled, and that we belong somewhere meaningful, that matters to us and matters to people we care about.
If you are feeling lost, frustrated, anxious or aimless, it is because you do not know how to articulate that prayer. You do not know how to get ‘home’—what it is you want to belong to or what will make you feel fulfilled and complete. And if you do know these things, either something is standing in your way, or you do not have the self-belief that you deserve these things or that you have what it takes to get there.
The older I got, the more important, prevalent, and troubling this ongoing conversation became for me. Eventually, when I realised I was going around in circles, I went looking for better language to hold that conversation in. I realised that I was in conversation with Fate & Destiny.
I came to understand that Fate is all the facts and reality of the world, and of ourselves that we cannot change. In one sense, this is everything we are handed at birth, everything about our biography and the status quo of the world, and our families, and the era we arrive through. In another sense, we are arriving all the time in the present moment. Fate is also everything about ourselves and the world that we cannot change right now.
Destiny, by deduction, is about what we are called to become in spite of, or perhaps because of, these immutable facts. Our Destiny becomes how we respond to our Fate, the choices we make, the paths we follow, and the growth we seek. This is not just a matter of ambition or achieving goals; it is about finding a deep, meaningful alignment with our true selves and our place in the world. Destiny is about realising our true potential and becoming the person we are meant to be. Destiny and Destination have the same root, meaning that where we end up, is where we aim our efforts.
This ongoing dialogue between Fate and Destiny shapes our lives. The problem is that our Fate also hands us a set of ideas and beliefs that we inherit from our childhood and our cultures. The conversation you are having right now—about who you want to be and what it will take to make you feel ‘whole and home’—is coloured and shaped by experiences that shaped you, which you did not choose and which you cannot change. Your Destiny in this sense is being defined by your Fate.
Part of that is never going to change. You cannot change your Fate. But you can change your perspective and the paradigm you operate from.
If you want to step up to the limits of your current potential, it is your behaviours you focus on. If you want to transcend your current limits and see what potential and magic you are truly capable of, you have to shift your paradigm.
We never get initiated into the possibility or the necessity of easing the tightness with which we hold the conversation with our Fate and with our Destiny. In many ways, our language and paradigm are too small for the territory we are already struggling through and definitely too small for the dream that is trying to come alive in us.
Many years ago now, right in the heart of my own troubled youth, I was drawn to the work of Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran who said:
“Pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding.”
My grasp of this simple and profound truth has continued to deepen with every cycle of growth and healing that I have been through, gracefully or stumbling blind. The “shell” in this metaphor is the paradigm we unconsciously construct around our understanding and perception, and the limits these imply to our perspective. These can be moral and cultural superstitions, prejudices, biases, comfort zones, or even ignorance that we hold onto, all of which we inherit from the life and time, and place, we are born into.
Pain, whether emotional, physical, or spiritual, acts as a catalyst for dismantling the smaller paradigm. It challenges the existing boundaries of our understanding. Just as a physical shell must break for something to emerge or expand, pain breaks these metaphorical shells, forcing us to confront new realities and grow beyond our previous limits. Once the shell is broken, what emerges is a new, expanded understanding. This is what enables us to inhabit a larger paradigm. Understanding this leads to an appreciation of the experiences you have had. You begin to realise that your life was the mechanism that life moulded you and that marked your birth into deeper forms of understanding. All our experiences shape us, but our difficult experiences define us.
So much of what you believe you want or deserve or even what you are capable of achieving is defined by a version of you that you would need to outgrow to truly embrace your Destiny. Destiny is not just about potential, or even your potential, it is very much about your authenticity.
When you cannot find the answers you are looking for, the invitation is always to ask better questions.
Asking better questions…
If you tried to jump on the internet today, with an old internet browser from 15 years ago, you would either have a very frustrating experience or you would, without even being aware of it, be having a very limited experience. The web from a decade ago was much simpler, and much more primitive in a sense than the one we have today.
No matter how much performance improvement you get from troubleshooting and tuning your computer, you are still ultimately solving the wrong problem, looking for final answers in limited questions. Life is like that, and you are still trying to jump onto the web of life with the dated browser of your unexamined paradigm that you inherited from a less experienced and more naive version of yourself, all the while, worrying if your computer is flawed.
Asking ‘better’ questions can lead us to a deeper understanding and more poignant questions. It shifts our focus from seeking immediate answers in the context of the old paradigm to exploring the possibilities hidden within the questions themselves. This approach encourages us to think more critically and creatively, broadening our perspective and allowing us to see new pathways and opportunities. It is especially valuable when dealing with complex issues like understanding our life’s purpose, navigating personal growth, or confronting challenges where straightforward answers are not available.
This should make you wonder, how much of who you think you are and what you think will help you be whole and home is actually a narrow fiction.
After all the many miles and countless challenges I have faced to get where I was going, the farther along I got on my way, the more the same two lessons kept surprising me again and again. The first is how I was never overcoming trials and obstacles, I was always simply overcoming myself. The second turned out to be my own voice of grace and wisdom asking me how gracefully I might return to this simple understanding time and again and how quickly I might remember that I was always struggling along my own story.
One day you will appreciate where you are now.
To appreciate something means we need to properly understand it, which can only be done when we consider it from the appropriate perspective. This means recognising that every step of your journey, every hurdle, and every moment of self-doubt, has been a pivotal part of sculpting who you are today. The challenges did not just change you; they revealed you. As you continue to navigate your path, remember that the ability to appreciate where you are hinges on accepting that every experience, pleasant or painful, is integral to your story.
Understanding and acceptance are not destinations; they are processes—ongoing and ever-unfolding. They ask of us to be patient and kind, both with ourselves and with our circumstances. Embrace where you stand today—it is not just a random point along your journey, but a testament to the remarkable distance you have already come and the experience you have gained along the way. And as you look to the horizon, know that this moment is not just a filler passage in your story—it is the very essence of it.
Embrace your narrative with compassion and curiosity and redefine it. Let your curiosity be your guide to a deeper understanding and richer appreciation of both your journey and your Destination. Remember, the path ‘to be whole and to be home’—to fulfilment and belonging—winds through the necessary terrain of self-discovery. You are not overcoming trials and obstacles—you are always overcoming yourself.
Whenever you feel lost, anxious, alone in all the world, frustrated by circumstance and your heart broken by the seeming indifference of life, remember, you are not lost, you are not adrift in an endless sea—you are standing at the shoreline of your own Story, knee-deep in the shallowness of the outdated paradigms you are ready to transcend.
Lift your gaze, find the star that you were following, connect with the simple truth in your own heart, and remember: this moment is not in the way, this moment is the way.