There has been a season of silence – of limiting my writing to just work related content or just little musings here and there. My heart, for the most part, has chosen to simply listen, heal, and just take in this new life that has been given to me.
But today, despite my 8 PM bedtime on Mondays, the urge to write is greater.
I started off the day sharing this beautiful quote from Cheryl Strayed:
“I’ll never know and neither will you about the life you didn’t choose. We will only know that whatever that life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that did not carry us. There is nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
The passage gripped my heart the moment I read it. In my 20s I have always believed that God had a plan specifically for my life and that closed doors meant that what was beyond it wasn’t meant for me.
I have firmly held on to that belief and yet as I bade goodbye to the idealism of my youth, I slowly questioned if this was true.
At 30 years old, I have begun questioning the beliefs and foundations I have built my life on and the results were always a mix bag of challenges, skepticism, and wonder. It’s a joy to unravel the box of what I used to believe in, examine it for what it is, and discover new perspectives.
It is quite possible to remain true to the core of your beliefs while going on a journey to know more about life.
Just like Cheryl Strayed said, it is possible to have a sister life and maybe that sister life reflects the life I once dreamt of for myself (or was it a life that someone else decided for me? I am still figuring that out) but it doesn’t matter because the life I have now, as I type this, is the life that I have chosen.
There is a different kind of joy that comes with accepting this truth: for whatever reason, this is the life I have chosen and even though it is imperfect, I delight in it because I chose it.
This means that at one point in my life, I abandoned what I thought what was aesthetically good for me to pursue what felt authentic to my heart and my soul. And it did not come in a pretty package – I had to wrestle to get to this place and my journey is just beginning.
There’s no roadmap to this life and one is never assured of what’s next but despite that uncertainty, something inside of me is overwhelmed with joy because despite the curiosity of a sister life, I know in my heart that I am where I am supposed to be.
It’s the irony of choices and letting it go. It’s that sweet middle nobody can truly define – it’s where reality meets the supernatural and we are so blessed to be in the midst of it.
