Letting Go and Drifting Forward:
When Fear Means You’re On the Right Path
Dear friend,
“Which way now?” is a question I’ve been asking myself for a while. Letting go of your moorings, you understand you’ll be drifting for a while. If Jerry and Esther Hicks are correct, then going with the current is what life wants us to do.
If I do that for a while, drift with the current of life, where does that take me?
Maybe, where it won’t take me is a better place to start?
It won’t take me to an upholstered armchair, in front of endless reruns of shows that promise to but never can fill a great chasm in my guts. Nor foods that overtax my body’s organs to the point they shave years off my life expectancy.
Not into the kind of drifting that fills your mouth with bread and your senses with the thrills and spills and gloom and impending doom of passive consumption.
The unhappy conditions of extractive, transactional, and ethically corrupt systems.
This type of letting go is more likely to see you becoming more impactful, even as you feel like nothing is being done.
Joining a group and learning something new about yourself. Those groups networking together and collaborating and meeting and growing together. Following the flow of your curiosity, you may discover where joy has been patiently waiting for you.
It’s been about ten months since I stepped out of a formal teaching role. I’ve always had my coaching practice, so that would be the boat whose ropes I untied and in which I now drift downstream. And my relationship with Chiara. And my friends and family and neighbours, which includes, of course, you—the dear soul reading this stuff.
But to go with the current of life, I’m not speaking of allowing oneself to be misled. Just because a million people across the world are persuaded to work and act and live contrary to their own best interests, doesn’t mean go join them and make it a million and one.
I can’t say what anyone should do, because I’m working it out myself.
What I can say is that making space in your life for something new can be exciting and scary. Shape-shifting is unnerving.
That job, relationship, or role that you are almost done outgrowing—either it will change or you will leave it.
In your own time.
In your own way.
Taking the one step in front of you and learning to trust that you’ll work it out and you’ll handle it. You can’t expect a neat line. It’ll be messy, and there are plenty of places you’ll get tangled up. Working out these entanglements. Recognising your own path as you look back on it, woven into the collective cloth of space and time.
It’s all a way of saying, be brave.
Which means to take a step into the unknown.
Don’t mistake the presence of fear as failure or necessarily proof of a bad omen.
If you were not afraid, then what use would you have for courage?
Till tomorrow
Love
Mikey