Life is a series of choices and decisions. Different paths to take at every stage.
Sometimes, when everything is aligned and the gods, goddesses and angels are all on our side, we take the most wonderful path. We go where our soul knows we need to go and where we grow in ways we could never have imagined. It takes our breath away and leads us to fulfil a vital part of our calling and true-self’s realisation. These are the times in our life which we cherish and which sustain us through the heartache that accompanies those other less than fortunate times in our life.
Those are the other paths we take. The ones that don’t work out, where we had to stop, double-back, change course or get to the end of a trail which ended in disappointment, error, or worse, a tragedy of some sort involving injury or loss.
These are the choices we look back on and grieve. They’re the ones that break our heart wide open again and again. “If only…” we keep saying to ourselves. “If only I listened; not done that; if I’d taken a bit longer to consider…” All to no avail.
Gradually, we learn all we can do is accept that IS what we chose and mourn for the pain, suffering or loss which resulted.
We need to also mourn for our younger, more naïve self whose hopes and desires led us down the wrong track. Maybe also for our trauma-self who was fleeing some intolerable inner feeling and so ran as quickly as she could down the first path available to her. Her instincts barley functioning; her programming telling her she should go this way or that, or her domineering parent or sibling adding pressure to be that which she truly is never meant to be.
Yet, in this process of looking back and mourning, we also discover just who we really are. Why those paths were not for us and why the blissfully joyful ones were. We learn what aligns for us and what doesn’t.
Many times in our life we reach these crossroads and we must choose. Hopefully, the older we get the wiser we become as we gradually heal our wounded instincts, hone our intuition, take the time to slow down and breathe into what each choice feels like as we strengthen our capacity for discernment.
In the end, all we can do is let ourselves grieve; be kind to ourselves for who we are now and who we were then; be compassionate for ourselves and continue to be generous towards ourselves, as we so easily are to those we love. In the process we fine-tune our self-love and we accept that even though we stumbled many times along the way, sometimes losing everything in the process, we made it to here.
And here is the only place we can now go from.
©Angela Dunning
Artwork: 'Infinity Trail' by Vladimir Kush.