Whenever one gets asked ‘What do you want in life?’, the mind goes blank.
Nothing comes up, or everything comes up. A straightforward answer seems impossible to form.
A while ago, I read the following advice:
“Stop trying to answer that question.”
This made my eyebrows frown… I always thought this question to be a very important one.
I was triggered and kept on reading. The article further explained.
Whenever the question pops up, stop thinking about how to answer it. Just let the whole matter marinate in your mind, without too much focus on the exact answer.
It can be so overwhelming, having to know what you want out of life, what you will be doing in 5 years’ time, how you see your career evolving, … It almost seems impossible to picture it.
Start by zooming in on what you will be doing today, on what you will be doing the next hour even.
Wanting to have it all figured out, is too much. It’s nice to have a direction, but the details will come step by step. Don’t force the detailed picture.
Every change you make is important, even the smallest ones.
Just go with what you feel is good for you.
To make it easier on the mind to find out what you want, to see where you want to go, it is very important to move. Don’t sit still all the time.
Move physically.
Move mentally.
Move emotionally.
Moving creates a liberty in the mind, moving creates clarity, and therefor enhances the thinking processes.
In Greek history, we see the great philosophers, teaching while walking around with their students following them.
There are coaches who have their sessions while walking. Walking makes it easier to talk as the mind feels free, and one feels less pressured as there is no strict setting of who sits where.
The body is moving and this makes one feel freer. Being outside, breathing in the fresh air, … creates a perfect setting for thinking, for finding solutions, for being creative, and for feeling more connected.
In the ‘not knowing the answer yet’, is exactly where the magic lies.
When trying to figure out what you want out of life, it is essential, not focus too much on the very concrete answer.
Bask in the not knowing, embrace this feeling that nothing is set in stone.
This letting go of the outcome, is what gives you an enormous sense of freedom. That freedom will make it possible to find answers. It’ll give you the emotional and a mental freedom to know what you want and who you really are.
Letting all be possible is what will bring ideas.
You stumble upon ‘passion’, you don’t find it.
It’s by doing, it’s by trying out all sorts of ideas, that you will discover where your passion lies.
Stop thinking about forever. Think about an idea, try it out, explore, fail and move on.
That is how you will find out what you like, and what not.
One expects students to decide at the age of 18, what they want to do for the rest of their lives. That is just impossible. How can we know at that age what we want to do for the rest of our lives?
It’s a miracle that so many people ‘guess’ right and continue to work in what they studied for. But we also see lots and lots of people still trying to figure it out, even at the end of their career.
The thing is, that
we believe we can think our way out of it, but we can’t.
It’s not by thinking about it, that we will suddenly know what we want.
At most, we can come up with an idea. But it’s in following up on ideas, that we’ll know whether it is something that we’ll like or not.
The less pressure we put on ourselves, the more we can distance ourselves from trying to find our passion, and the more likely we’ll come up with all sorts of new ideas. And one of those ideas will be the one for you.
My advice to you all is, stop asking yourself what you want to do for the rest of your lives.
Just live now, live today.
Enjoy life, be grateful.
Be open to all kinds of ideas and try them out.
Stop holding on to very specific results.
Define the direction you want to follow.
Go and absorb all that comes your way.
Enjoy the journey.
Make every moment count.
And in the end, you’ll realize that this is where happiness lies, in having all these, small, wonderful moments forming the beautiful movie called, your life.
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Katrien