SOUL SEARCHING

soul searching

How to figure out what you want in life.

Do you ever find yourself daydreaming about a very different life? One where you are not sitting at a desk in a building in front of a computer? One where YOU are making all the choices of what to do and when to do it? If so, you are in good company.

Many of us have questioned if we have made the right choices: if we are doing the best things in our life, and if we are really doing what we love.

I too have had this re-think. In fact, in retrospect, I had been thinking about a different life from the one I had for at least a decade. The good news is that having these thoughts, evaluating your life, is a really helpful step no matter what direction you ultimately take. It is a step toward understanding yourself and it opens you up to your best life.

So grab some paper or open up your online journal and let’s work together to learn more about who we are and what matters most to us.

At the end of a thorough evaluation you might decide that you love your life. For you then, the exercise of thinking about what you are doing is an affirmation that you want to stay on your present path. That is still very helpful.

No one wants to get to the end of their lives without ever considering all the possibilities.

For others, like me, spending time seeing other people embracing the life that I really felt I would cherish, finally hit home. I needed to pay attention to these feelings. Why do we suppress our true feelings, our wishes? We need to feel comfortable exploring how we really feel. Once you give yourself the space to explore your real wishes, you can then begin to act on them. Going from exploring to taking action can take a really long time. Take baby steps. There is no rush here.

I came to realize that when you think about what you love, when you are doing what you love, everything else seems to fall into place.

Life decisions can take a lifetime. Even if we like our jobs, our lifestyles, reviewing how we spend our time and what we want for the future can help insure that we are happy. Sometimes we realize that we are not happy and we come to these questions of what we should be doing and what we want to do over and over again. Some of us spend hours, days, weeks and even years mulling over what we are doing with our lives. Others get caught up in the flow of life and only afterwords realize that maybe they should have reconsidered what they were doing with their lives. We spend a lot of time accepting what is going on in our lives and justifying the need to endure difficult or unhappy situations.

We rarely allow ourselves to think about what we “could” be doing. At least not in any realistic way.

We pore over beautiful inspiring instagram posts of what other people are doing every day. If you are like me, your feed is filled with adventurers-people that courageously embraced this unique lifestyle and seem to thrive in it. But we don’t allow ourselves the possibility of doing these things-even when we are pretty sure that this lifestyle would bring us joy. There are so many reasons for this.

We have been trained from early on to follow directions. Many of us are uncomfortable taking the unbeaten path.

It feels scary and it is hard to imagine doing something so different from our co-workers, our neighbors, our friends and family. It is natural to worry about these things. It is also right to make sure that we are staying safe financially. These are real issues. But have we actually really explored these issues, these obstacles that convince us that we cannot have the life we dream about? Have we done an honest side to side comparison of our present life and one that includes doing some of the things that we love? Make sure to do this comparison in your journal. It will bring clarity to what is great about your life and what might need some adjustment.

If you decide to make a change, you don’t have to change everything. And you don’t have to change everything all at once.

In fact, one of the biggest changes that you can achieve is just to allow yourself to THINK realistically about new possibilities. Schedule these brainstorming sessions into your week. Go out and buy an organizer or planner or journal or create an online journal and jot down your thoughts about what such a change would look like. No need to be specific at first.

Just putting these thoughts to paper or creating an online journal of them can help us understand ourselves better.

When it is pretty clear from your journaling, that you want to explore doing the things that you really love, it is time to take action. This does not need to be any grandiose process where you quit your job, or give up your home. Sometimes what feels best is to dip your feet into this new lifestyle. Test the waters. Think about carving out a day a week or the weekends to explore.

Even allowing yourself one day to follow your heart, your dreams, to try to live the life that you long for is life changing.

It opens up your eyes to what your life could be like. Perhaps you always dreamed of traveling in a van and seeing the world. Can you imagine starting the process of looking into switching your car to a van, to pricing it out and learning about the modifications that you yourself can do to make it sleep worthy and cook worthy. Or you could buy a book about hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains and start planning your first trip.

If you have felt unsure about your life and how you spend your time, beginning the process of exploring new possibilities can feel really hopeful and exciting.

So grab a journal, carve out an hour from each day for yourself, and start the process of learning what it is that you really want to be doing. No matter what you learn from this, journaling every day will become something to look forward to and eventually, to look back on later.