Stepping Away

Why does it often take a crisis to bring you face to face with the big questions in life?

• Who am I?
• What am I meant to do with my life?
• What is life really all about?

Often when you feel you are in crisis you seek evidence that you are a good person that you are becoming everything you can be. You become more reflective, relying on your stored courage and chipping away your ego to the core of your being, seeking your purpose. You want to make sense of your life. You ask yourself, “what is life really all about and how do I fit in?”

When you are in the midst of a crisis, you feel as if you are in a dense fog. You can barely see your own hand in front of your face. You are seeking a way out to a clearer understanding a visible path. You want to feel safe.

When you finally surrender, you realize that in the stillness of the fog, with nothing else to distract you, you can hear a small voice inside you. If you pay attention and trust your inner calling, you will be lead out of the fog. This voice will lead you one-step, one thought, one action at a time. Each will move you away from the city of pride, the place of ego toward the sanctuary of gratitude, the palace of peace.

You can build the strength of your inner voice by learning in the day-to-day challenges of life, instead of waiting for a crisis. Every day you are challenged to take one-step at a time. When you are driving to work and someone signals to merge in front of you, do you step towards kindness or away from kindness toward pride? When you find yourself facing a family member acting in a way that you dislike, do you step towards love and forgiveness or away towards righteousness and judgment? When you have been given too much change at the drive-thru window, do you step towards honesty or greed? Thousands of times a day, you move in one direction or another. Your thoughts and action move you in one direction or another.

Learning to step away from pride, judgment, the need to be right, and ego, and step toward gratitude, kindness, forgiveness, honesty, love, and compassion strengthens the clarity of your purpose. You learn that you are here to share your gifts and talents in a way that will better yourself and the world as a whole. Each moment is an opportunity to be the change you wish to see. 

The opportunity to live your purpose comes in the small daily acts of life more often than in the grandiose gestures viewed by the masses. Small acts create the legacy you leave.

In which direction will you be stepping today?