Life isn’t a straight line on a leaderboard. It’s a scribble that somehow turns into a drawing.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
Coherence is something that emerges rather than something you execute. Looked at in progress, a life is a series of unrelated decisions, reversals and accidents with no discernible plan, and then at some distance the marks resolve into a shape that looks almost deliberate. Nobody draws it in one stroke, and anyone who says they did is editing.
Stop grading yourself on how straight the line currently looks. Make the next mark honestly, in the direction that seems right from here. The resolution happens later and cannot be forced from inside the scribble.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
Where does your path look messier than you expected?
MORE IN MEANING & PERSPECTIVE
- From a plane window, your entire city fits in a thumbprint. So does the problem you’ve been losing sleep over.
- Nobody on earth can tell you why you need to have it all figured out by twenty-five. They just made the number up.
- The toy you couldn’t live without at eight is in a box in the attic now. Today’s must-haves are headed there too.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.