Hi,
How are you this week? How do you walk when your heart demands of you steps which you are afraid to take?
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Do you know this feeling when all of you, secretly and on the inside, revolts and jolts and shivers like a wounded, wild animal when you witness a person doing the very precious thing you know you always wanted, and want still, to do? And their deed is even more so hurtful to you as deep down within your being, you can recognise the calling to do just the same. The readiness that tells you it could’ve been attempted long ago if it wasn’t for your gnawing fear and masterful skill in finding reason in the unreasonable.
That’s the ardent and moist body of our potential being touched and tingled, poked and pushed, yearning to emerge from within us, and do what it must.
It’s a scary thing, to come in touch with one’s possibilities. We know all too well that once we let them speak, they will haunt and chase us until we die and can run from them no more. They come at us in the least expected moments, disrupt our careful dailiness, and make us, forcefully, to turn our faces to their light, and to acknowledge their full, unobstructed presence.
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.”
— Marianne Williamson
What we are afraid of is, therefore, not so much our limitations, but the infinite within us.
How does one follow their calling?
In Shed Your Skin in Aloneness, I wrote that through letting go of the layers of pretend, insecurity, self-image, aversion and desires, and embracing our vulnerability — only fully available to us in the sweet, vast and absorbent spaces of solitude — we might get closer to an idea of where to go, and where our uniqueness is capable of exercising its one-and-only role.
John O’Donohue, the late Irish poet and philosopher, said in his conversation with Krista Tippett for On Being, that “there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.” And he also said that “the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”
And then there’s Rilke, who advises in the “Letters to a Young Poet” to "be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
Ultimately, to grab the hand of our potential trustingly, and to let it lead us, one must be prepared for the inevitable visit of confusion, despair, hopelessness, doubt, and loneliness.
The path of self-actualisation asks of us that we commit to it fully, and that we trust our own, quiet, secret encounters with it. It is there that it speaks to us, when we turn our ears and minds into the gentle hum of our inner landscapes, when we ask over and over again what is it that it yearns to speak, and when it finally does — we are ready to hear, and follow.
To reach and sustain gentleness, that seems to be the path.
As many of you may already experienced, dear readers, gentleness doesn’t come without pain. For hardship and softness enable one another and they sustain this cycle until we’re softened enough to embrace all the happening.
When there’s no resistance in us, we are ready to let everything happen to us, as Rilke continues to advice, and we don’t hold preference towards neither beauty nor terror, but we understand the essential role each of them has to play in actualising our potential.
Such a path is, of course, unwelcome by the general public, and thus, it is not unheard of for it to require a certain level of isolation. One must grow accustomed to solitude and self-reliance to, paradoxically, grow capable of serving. Because this, too, is what the calling is about. It never caters only to its host, but it seeks to reach many.
Let’s hear from John O’Donohue once more: “it’s lovely when you find someone at work who’s doing exactly what they dreamed they should be doing and whose work is an expression of their inner gift. And in witnessing to that gift and bringing it out, they actually provide an incredible service to us all. And I think you see that the gifts that are given to us as individuals are not for us alone, or for our own self-improvement, but they’re actually for the community and to be offered.”
Whatever it is that we are called to do, it is not given to us alone, but it is instilled within our beings to sow plenty and harvest abundantly for others’ benefit.
Therefore, within one’s means and capabilities, and those are certainly of overcoming the fear, one is, to put it plainly, responsible for learning the ways of listening and following the steps which one’s heart demands of them.
I believe we owe ourselves, and we certainly owe the world, at least as much as an attempt at understanding our calling and trusting its lead. We should at least go as far as to see where is it that it invites us to travel. That at least we can say, “I have seen the path, and I’ve chosen to go elsewhere”.
We must know what we were born for.
We are then free to choose how, and where to let our feet go, but let us make it a conscious, well-rounded choice. Let us not get lost in finding the reason in the unreasonable.
Let us not be consumed by the fear of the infinite within us.
Question to you, dear reader:
When does your potential call you the loudest?
When does your potential call you the loudest? - When I remove my awareness from it.