“Getting In My Way Is The Way.”

Transcript

Sometimes in life you think you’ve got it, only to realize, you never did.

One of the things I wish I was told when I was younger about forging your own path in life, is how confusing, frustrating and messy this whole process can be, and how sometimes you just feel so damn wrong. Like you’re doing everything wrong and you just can’t get it “right” for some reason. And you begin to question if you should ever even attempted to take the less trodden path.

Our educational systems and society are for the most part, constantly selling us this idea of us and our lives being a finished product, as well as the idea of our life’s evolution and growth happening in a very linear and clear cut way, but that’s not the reality of how things actually happen.

And when you’re a young adult in society you especially feel a lot of pressure to make the “perfect decisions” for your future, and to have it all figured out now, to clearly see and know the entire path before you that you must walk, but that’s another illusion and lie that we’re fed by society.

Because the getting lost, the not knowing what to do at times, or taking the wrong turns multiple times, is part of the process of forging your path.

If you’re living a life that is true to who you are, then nobody has walked this path that you’re walking before, which is why we can’t always see what’s ahead. At best we can see maybe 5 steps ahead, but not the entire path before us that we must walk, and if you can see the entire path ahead, well then you know the saying, it’s most likely not your path. Because your path is one that has never been walked before.

None of us come into this life with a clear guidebook on how to bring forth our essence, the truth of who we are, and our calling. The only things that we really have at our disposal are feelings, intuitions, and Soul nudges that let us know “hey move in this direction” or “hey back away from here.” And that’s if we listen to our inner voice, which our modern society makes it very hard to do.

And sometimes, even when you thought you were doing everything right, when you thought you were following the right voice, your inner voice, as opposed to the outer voices of society and the people around you, sometimes you can still “fail”, and end up feeling lost again or realizing that this vocation, job or thing you were pursing isn’t actually the right fit for you, and so you feel like you’re back at square one, wandering and stumbling in the darkness again.

And these kinds of experiences can really erode the faith and confidence we had in ourselves and in our intuition to accurately guide us in life towards being the person we came here to be and doing the life work that only we can do.

But I want to offer you a different perspective here, through which to view these life situations that we go through which can really shake us to our core and disorient us.

As an Artist when you begin to create something there’s always the initial chaos of burgeoning ideas swirling around in your mind, or on the page, you know if you’re a writer, you begin to write something and sometimes you have pages and pages of words, endless words and ideas, and the whole project can become a real mess, very chaotic and unclear, until, the thing you’re attempting to bring to life starts to make itself clear to you and you begin to chip away at everything that is not in alignment with the essence of the idea you’re trying to communicate, and then you finally have the thing, the story, the art work, the poem, whatever it is, you finally have that thing in front of you that you were looking to bring to life from within the depths of your being, and now you can finally share that with the world.

But the process of getting to that destination was not and is not a linear and clear cut path, it’s a winding road that is filled with several trials and errors. You try one idea, only to realize that that isn’t quite it, it doesn’t fully capture what you’re trying to express, so then you try again but this time with a different idea, but then that one might also end up being a dead end and not working out as you thought it would, and so you keep trying again and again, experimenting, testing things out, until it feels just right and you’ve finally got it, for real this time.

The creative process and the process of forging your own path in life are very similar I’ve found, if not one and the same. Ultimately when you’re creating something, you are for the most part, trying to express something truthful, something that is deeply meaningful to you, and when you manage to do so, when you manage to bring forth what is inside of you, onto the canvas, or the page, or the screen, there’s a deep fulfillment that you experience. And the same goes for in our daily lives when we work to express the truth who we are and why we’re here. When we manage to truthfully and precisely bring forth what is inside of us, onto the canvas of the world, in a daily consistent fashion, we experience deep fulfillment and go through a meaningful personal transformation in the process.

There’s a quote by Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter, director and writer where he says

I absolutely loved this when I heard it, I loved it when he shared the story of how he came to that conclusion that getting in his way, was the way for his creative process, because I feel that that lesson applies not just to art, but also to that of forging one’s path.

The obstacles and then the expression and transmutation of those obstacles into the art, into the path are part of the path, the not the getting it right, the failing, the mess, the chaos, the wrong turns, the what the hell am I doing here, how did I end up here, those are all as much a part of the creative process of creating art as they are a part of the creative process of creating a life that is our own. A life that is deeply fulfilling to us, because it’s ours. We’re not living anyone else’s life, this is our life we’re living.

And this process is not going to be a straight and smooth line, it’s gonna be all over the place at times, and it’s going to take it’s own time.

And of course we want to do our best to learn from our mistakes as we progress on our path and do better with each future choice that we make, but we will not be able to avoid the chaos and sometimes the confusion and self-doubt that come with this path we have chosen.

So if I could go back in time I'd tell my younger self that, listen you’re not going to get it right the first time my love, and that’s okay. You’re going to feel lost at times and wonder if you’re doing the right thing, but just because you feel lost and you feel that you haven’t found your way yet, it doesn’t mean that you never will, it just means you need to make room for the mess and the chaos that inevitably comes with forging one’s path.

So allow it to be there, the trials, the chaos, the messiness, allow it all to be there, because it has its place, and use it as material to move forward more powerfully because these events are not the waste of your path, these events are the path. This is the path, this is the transformation.

But above all I would say, allow yourself to start over again. Because you are not defined by your mistakes or your successes and neither is your future. Whenever you realize you’ve made a mistake, or failed, gone the wrong way, pursued the wrong thing, allow yourself to start over, again, and again, and again. Don’t get discourage, just because you took a wrong turn in life doesn’t mean your destiny is now set in stone and that’s it for you.

You have the ability to learn, the ability to grow from your mistakes, and the ability to pick yourself back up, and go again, until you finally manage to bring forth that thing within you, your essence, your calling that you were looking to express all along. Always remember this.

And lastly I would say, never ever lose faith in that precious inner knowing of yours, that you’ve felt since you were a child, that you’re meant to forge and walk your own path in life so that you can experience the profound fulfillment that comes with knowing that you expressed all that you came here to do and to be — because you deserve to experience that kind of fulfillment in your day to day life, not just occasionally but daily, and so does everyone else.

Don’t let the darkness of your path, the chaos or the mistakes of your past erode at this inner knowing of yours. Eventually you’ll learn to embrace the dark, the uncertainty and to navigate it with more faith and confidence. But until then, no matter how dark the path gets, no matter how many times you fall over some god forsaken obstacle on your path that you weren’t anticipating, don’t you dare settle, no matter how crippling the voices in your mind of self-doubt may be, don’t you dare settle for anything less than your heart’s utter delight.

We walk by faith not by sight, by faith that our Souls and our lives here have a higher expression that we, as the architects of our lives, are responsible for bringing forth into physical form.

Uploaded on February 12, 2025