The Path Is Made By Walking

We have no idea what will land on the shoreline of tomorrow.

Hi,

How are you this week? Where do your feet lead when the head is not lost in the search for direction?

Cornfield at sunset by John William Inchbold (English, 1830-1888)

For a while now, it feels like whatever I try touching and holding, looking for a good place for it on the shelves of time, life tosses it out of my hand. Meetings get cancelled, plans don’t work out, and I still don’t know what place to call home. I’m no stranger to this; it’s not the first time it happens. But sometimes, one yearns for the comfort of stability, even if knowingly illusory. It’s a habit that dies long.

Aimlessness, contrary to its typical negative connotations of purposelessness and directionlessness, can be a deeply enriching approach to life. It can be a way of being that opens us to the full experience of the moment. Letting go of rigid plans and embracing the uncertainty and fluidity of life can lead to a deeper understanding of self and what’s beyond it, resulting in a more authentic existence.

Life's true path reveals itself through a willingness to experience each moment fully without clinging to predetermined outcomes. Clarity can come from surrendering to the unpredictable nature of life, accepting that we don’t need to have everything figured out, and understanding that aimlessness can, paradoxically, guide us to more meaningful and fulfilled lives. Through it, we are encouraged to find stability within ourselves rather than in external circumstances.

The stream of knowing

When I went to the zen centre a few weeks ago, the teacher told us that we would see, which I have seen, how, once we start meditating seriously, life will begin kicking like a wild horse, rearing and bucking, taking unexpected turns. If we stick to our practice, the kicking will continue, with only brief periods of calm for one to recollect themselves.

The mind doesn’t like it when we expose its workings. Self-recognition unroots. When the familiar sense of self begins to dissolve, it invites groundlessness. Without a feeling of a firm foundation, we eventually begin to realise the aimlessness of our existence, with traditional goals and directions gradually losing their usual importance. But life, itself, unroots too.

It’s good enough to just be sometimes, without any goal in mind, ceasing all unnecessary action, and allowing the awareness to carry our existence from moment to moment. It knows better than we could ever know what it is we need. But it doesn’t come cheap. It requires unwavering trust, and surrender. And that’s not something we give readily and freely. While it’s so good for us, it is certainly not easy at all to just be. Therefore, it’s also troublesome to describe what being is about. Please consider this essay an attempt at it.

With work and patience, we might get lucky to occasionally enter this peaceful space of just being, but it can be challenging to inhabit it long-term. At least, that’s how it is for me, and for now. What poses a challenge here is that the stories of my mind call for action, for planning, for goal-oriented, mapped-out movement through the wild and tall grass of everydayness. Meanwhile, I know it: life happens in its own rhythm and is headed in a direction only known to itself, without a map.

The thinking mind, sensing this misalignment, can often cause more confusion and trouble than it offers answers and helpful guidance. So, I learn to rely on knowing rather than thinking. It’s an exercise necessary to be repeated daily; otherwise, it’s too easy to forget that just the simple act of breathing ensures we always arrive.

After some time of practice, my feet seem to be steeped in the refreshing stream of that knowing already, which would make sense since they’re furthest away from the thinking head, and they’re the ones responsible for walking. The head, on the other hand, still tries to catch thoughts floating around, like my dog hunting for flies, snapping her jaws in the air. So that, you see, is the trouble. A habit that dies long. If I get torn apart as a consequence of it, please don’t follow my head. It will tell you nothing worthwhile.

I found that I don’t need to understand nearly as much as I thought I should, in order to live. It is quite feasible to keep arriving in each moment with curiosity and otherwise empty-handed. Although, of course, it requires certain remodelling of the idea of a “life well-lived.” For that purpose, one needs to come to terms not only with one’s own stories, expectations and standards but with those posed by society, too.

It’s a process, and it’s a walk. With our awareness turned inwards, we move forward on a path that only reveals its fragments just when we are about to put our foot down, making the next uncertain step. That’s why it might be better to trust our feet instead of heads. The thing is about walking, and persistently so — not about trying to predict the direction.

"As you start to walk on the way, the way appears." - Rumi⁠

I had a call with a friend yesterday, and we spoke about birthdays, and that ours, approaching, are a deadline by which we imagined our lives would have been “sorted out” in ways one tends to think of by default: family, career, a house to live in. That was the aim.

Meanwhile, life, indeed, happens in its own rhythm and is headed in a direction only known to itself, without a map. And, as I often say, one rarely knows what’s best for them.

Now I understand that imagining how my life would be organised by this age, I overlooked one crucial element, which eventually took precedence over organising everything else: sorting out my-self. If I continued aiming at what I thought I should have been aiming for, I would have missed terribly. Aimlessness, therefore, is to thank for guiding me back to myself. But even though it is so, I still need to keep reframing my understanding of — and readiness for it.

“Usually aimless-ness has a bit of a negative connotation. It implies we lack direction in our life, that we lack willpower or are indecisive,” writes Toby Ouvry in his article “Aimlessness — The broken arrow” and continues to explain that “aimlessness here is the practice and experience of being whole and complete, here and now. It is not feeling the need to chase our bodily, psychological and spiritual desires all over the place.”

This state of completion and wholeness is something that is “revealed to us progressively as we let go of the various different levels of conditioning and conception within our consciousness.”

Or, in the words of the Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh: “Aimlessness is the attitude of someone who does not feel the need to run after anything, realize or obtain anything. It is for example not pursuing enlightenment as an object of knowledge.”

For some of us, those of us for whom lighthearted joy doesn’t come easily and for whom the task of living can feel a highly arduous business, consciously allowing the concept of aimlessness can make a world of difference.

Whether you're reevaluating career choices, personal relationships, or simply seeking a deeper sense of peace, embracing aimlessness can offer a fresh perspective. Turning our attention inwards, we can slowly be softened into trusting the flow and guidance of life. Through it, we are better equipped to find stability within ourselves rather than in external circumstances.

Being remains

In my own search for guidance and understanding, I found that, first of all, accepting that we are lost and that our intellectual functions are limited, is a very helpful, and very humbling step. We must be okay with not knowing what to do. This opens us up to living our lives through exploration instead of outcome-oriented doing.

Many of us fear exploration because we’ve tied our sense of worth to the fruits of our actions. In praise of efficiency, hustle, optimisation, personal achievements, wealth accumulation and status, we lose the grip of our worth inherent to the life flowing within us, and we grow to believe that unless we do, we cannot be. Which, of course, is the other way around (as I explained in my last essay).

A perhaps helpful exercise here could be to simply sit for a moment and try to allow things to happen. To let every thought, every emotion, every sensation occur without intervening. After a while, we might be able to notice that even if we cease all action, except that of our internal organs, fundamental to our survival, we remain. And with us, our worth remains, too, untouched. “Qualities of experience are always changing, but the fact of being remains the same throughout,” said Rupert Spira, a philosopher and author.

Now that we’ve checked and perhaps even allowed the idea that our worth isn’t dependent on our actions, we can try embracing another concept, helpful in this endeavour. The fact that, to a large extent, we live our lives guessing and hoping disguised as planning and executing.

Under the certainty of our actions and the comforting predictability of tomorrow, there’s a pulsating wild quality of life, turning in unpredictable motions like an untamed horse. Allowing ourselves to peek into this truth from time to time can serve as a much-needed reminder that even if we’ve carefully structured our lives and made arrangements intended to keep our days in pleasantly invariable frames, there’s only so much we can control and do, while all the rest remains a subject for exploration and trust.

Life, as Lao Tzu advised, “is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.”

In order to find ourselves, we must be willing to get lost. Searching for our paths, we will inevitably, at times, lose track of them. Befriending aimlessness and groundlessness might be our best, and perhaps only, means of ensuring that we can, and will, still thrive in full awareness of the unpredictability of life. But perhaps thriving might mean something different than we’d imagine now — another concept to put into question.

Exercising this perspective is, I find, helpful as a preparation for times when we have no other choice but to face the unexpected events of life. When a “forever” loved one passes away suddenly, when we lose our “stable” job, when the health we took for granted ceases to serve us as well as it used to. In those moments, we are thrown into the realm of exploration, an act of letting go of the precious sense of control and returning our beings to the patient ocean of aimlessness in which our existence has always been contained.

Preparing ourselves for those testing moments by embracing the daily unpredictability of life and the courageous act of exploration, can help us to recognise the comforting sense of familiarity in the largely foreign terrain of life’s uprooting changes. Once they come our way.

“We have no idea what will land on the shoreline of morning tomorrow, so that we are always actively involved in receiving and shaping.”

— John O’Donohue, The Inner Landscape of Beauty (podcast interview with Krista Tippett, On Being)

Wouldn’t it be helpful to know that we don’t have to be chasing outcomes all the time, but we can lean into exploration?

Even if we are scared and unsure of where to put our foot next, we can relax a bit and allow the current of life to carry us gently to the shoreline of tomorrow. Receiving time and shaping the path as we walk it, we can be sure we will always be found.

Question to you, dear reader:

Where do your feet lead when the head is not lost in the search for direction?

With much love,

Justyna