Trusting life

courtesy of terrylamb.net

I know, today is Valentine’s Day. Love is in the air. Writing about love makes complete and total sense. It’s not that I don’t love love – oh, I do! I wrote about love earlier in the week And, I have a very special Valentine – but he is headed out of town overnight so we’re taking a rain check for our special celebration.

Today I want to write about trusting life. I am reading Rachel Noami Remen’s My Grandfather’s Blessings and the last paragraph in the Counting Your Chickens chapter struck a cord with me:

Life has an elegance that far exceeds anything we might devise. Perhaps the wisdom lies in knowing when to sit back and wait for it to unfold. Too hasty an activism may lead to lesser outcomes and, more important, may cause us to trust ourselves rather than learning to trust life. ~Rachel Noami Remen

This seems like sage advice to me, especially regarding career planning. People seem to ask me questions like what job do you want to have in 5 or 10 years and what are you doing to move your career forward. There’s an implicit expectation that I should take charge, that I need a plan. And, there is some truth to that – however, the answer is not usually what they expect. My path forward involves focusing on having a deep understanding of who I am, what I bring to this world, what my strengths are, what I am passionate about and by getting clear about what success looks like to me. That’s something I can definitely relax into as I dream about my future.