A Change of Direction

I came across some words from Paul Coelho this morning that caught me at just the right moment. He writes "Everything tells me that I am about to make a wrong decision, but making mistakes is just part of life. What does the world want of me? Does it want me to take no risks, to go back to where I came from because I didn't have the courage to say yes to life?" I crossed a particular line in my life a few weeks ago and made an abrupt, change of direction. I said no to my wonderful career and offered my resignation. I said yes to the unknowns of self-employment and the lure of "following my bliss."

On paper, my decision looks like a wrong decision, a poor choice. No one would counsel me to make such an abrupt pivot at my age. I should be saving for retirement. I should be settling in rather than uprooting. But sometimes, the greater risk is to do nothing, or to play it safe. I would not look back at my life ten years from now and wonder what would have happened if I had only had the courage to follow my vision, my bliss.

In the upcoming months, I hope you will travel with me as I follow the word "yes" and let it lead me into unknowns, right off the edge of the map. I hope you will share your own experiences of saying "yes" when the world viewed your decision skeptically. What I am experiencing since I crossed this particular threshold and set aside the tried and true path of my day job is an incredible, lightening of spirit and not the deathly worry I had anticipated. I have experienced encouragement from friends, and not counsel to be more practical and run my cost-benefit analysis before jumping ship.

What I have been trying to figure out in my head for so long, I can only find with a different sort of exploration. My "answers," if there are answers, are found on a different sort of map. We can only walk our way into these answers, not think our way into them. We make mistakes. We get lost. We get stranded in the desert or caught in a downpour. We open the door and leave the safety of home, even if the weather is bad or the bank account isn't full enough.

What I am finding is that I am no longer interested in arriving at some illusory form of happiness. There will never be enough success in the form of contribution, career, home or relationship. I will not "arrive." There is no finish line to cross, but I am seeing that things get better and brighter the more I say that yes that Paul Coelho speaks of. I am beginning to realize that what I walk myself into with that yes far exceeds any fairytale ending I might have imagined for myself.