there and back again

It is, indeed, a dangerous business, going out your door. And it’s true, if you step onto the road without keeping your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.

Yet, the not-knowing-of-the-sweeping is a fate far preferable to the knowing-of-staying-still. Because rivers that move become oceans. And those that don’t? Slowly fade away.

There will always be “the old tug at your ankles.” The constant buzzing in your ears. The many voices who wish to tell you where and how and for what you should live your life. But there is only one person who has to live it. Only one spirit which has to carry the weight of whether the version of yourself you are choosing to accept is the one for which you were created.

There is no word dreadful enough to describe the feeling, the utter suffocation, which comes from contemplating the life within you which is not being lived. Know this: if the life you are taking into your lungs is not your own, some day, you will find yourself panting for breath, drowning in the ocean of others’ expectations, your eyes fixed in panic at the distant, dying shore of the person you were not brave enough to be.

No price is as great as the one which requires you to discard who you are for who others think you should be. No blade is as sharp as the one which slices your dreams finely into dust, such that you hardly remember nor long for them anymore. What, will you rise in the opinion of others, only to fall in the estimation of your own soul? Nothing is worth the grief, the cutting grief, of this exchange.

Refuse stillness. Choose not knowing. Choose being swept away. Stride, “deeper and deeper into the world.” Determine “to do the only thing you [can do], to save the only life that you [can] save.”

There are friends that you must discover. Seek them out and earn the heart to stand beside them. There are foes that you must face. Know them well and grow the courage to stand against them. Come upon the spring and drink, not shallow, but deep, so that you may, through this quest, realize the divine purpose for which you are here.

Choose to step out of your door. To go, there and back again.

Do this, so at the end, when you tell your tale, it will be yours to tell.