The Rebel Philosopher's Blog

I came upon a familiar choice today: stay or go. Continue on the path or drop it and move on to the next thing? I chose to stay.

Traditionally, this question has frustrated me. Every time it’s come up, it’s brought an existential crisis. If I’m confronted with the choice, then it must be time to leave, otherwise, I wouldn’t be offered the choice. But is that story true?

Not necessarily. There’s something to be said for pausing to check our progress, assess how we feel, and question whether it’s time to make a new choice. Truthfully, there’s nothing wrong with that process. Where we tend to run into trouble is with the reactionary thought that the question is offering us a problem to solve. Does the question automatically mean I need to change something? No. It’s simply offering me the opportunity to take control if I want to. It’s like coming up to an exit ramp on the highway. Just because the ramp is there doesn’t mean I need to turn off. It’s a choice I can make, not a command to change directions.

I’ll be honest, I almost made a reactionary choice. I almost gave in to my frustration. If I had, the decision would have come from pain. Thankfully, I have decks of cardboard (aka tarot) to remind me of what I know. Choices made from pain aren’t generally helpful, and they often create more pain.

If I have a goal, regardless of how impractical it might seem, I need to stay the course. I need to find a way to hang on a little longer. What needs to shift in my perception or thinking to allow me to do that? Where is the frustration coming from?

You want to know what my frustration is? I’m impatient. Nothing else. I’m just impatient. I live in a world of instant gratification, and guess what? I get annoyed when I’m not instantly gratified. I, too, get to learn the simple lesson of patience through my experience.

But there is one other thing I’ve also been reminded of — trust. I have to trust my vision. I have to trust that, eventually, if I continually follow the proverbial breadcrumb trail and move in the direction of what I want, I can have it. When it comes to being patient with a goal, trust is the single most important thing you can have. It’s much easier to be patient when you trust your vision.

When we lose trust in our vision, it’s much easier to give it up when it doesn’t happen quickly enough. For the longest time, I didn’t completely trust my vision. I had one foot out the door regularly. I was ready to abandon ship at the first sign of trouble because I didn’t trust it.

Let’s reach for some philosophy and spiritual truth for a second. Is it really some external vision or circumstance that I need to trust? No. It’s myself. The only thing I need to trust is that I can handle what happens next. If I do that, I can move forward with anything I want to, no matter how impractical or crazy it might seem. After a thousand detours, missteps, confusion, and a lot of frustration, I’m finally understanding what that trust needs to look like. You know what? It takes a lot of courage to do this.

I’ve had to do a lot of internal work to find a firm footing. I’ve been all over the board in both my work and personal life. It took courage to keep convincing myself that staying put was the right choice. Self-mastery is about learning to be okay within yourself, regardless of what’s happening—or not happening—around you. That’s a constant process.

I spend a lot of time writing about philosophy and spirituality, and I try to remind my readers that I’m still human, as much as I can. I’m still working through my stuff too. For as much as I understand what I need to do, I still get tied up in my own stories sometimes. I still have those moments of frustration. I get how much courage and effort this takes, because I still have to put in that effort myself.

Do I have an easier time of things now than I did when I started this 10 years ago? Of course. If this had come up back then, I would have been gone in a shot. I wouldn’t have been able to even question what the problem was or why I wanted to leave. I would have just left. The difference now is that I’m not as reactive to my own emotions. Do I wallow in it sometimes? Sure. I’m human, remember? But it doesn’t have to mean making snap decisions. I can still slow down, understand myself, and then make better choices. I get less tied up in the stories, but it doesn’t mean I never get tied up in the story.

I call it self-mastery, but we’re not mastering anything. We’re getting better at understanding ourselves, recognizing cycles, questioning our thinking, and making better choices. But it will never be perfect. I will never get to a place where I make the right choice every single time. I will never get to a place where my thinking doesn’t get the better of me for a minute. I’m still human, and that means imperfection, because that’s what being human is.

Sometimes, I think writing blogs like this is still a helpful process. I used to do it all the time. This was the only type of blog I would write because it was how I fixed my own thinking. To this day, I still believe the only reason people read those blogs was because they enjoyed watching a slow-motion train wreck. Regardless of why they were reading my writing, though, there was a lot of valuable, constructive questioning taking place in those blogs.

Now, I write this solely to remind everybody that I’m human. It’s not a perfect system, and it’s one that takes a lot of internal work to maintain. It’s a daily spiritual practice of sorts. It’s not always easy. But when I can write a blog like this and notice the change in the outcome of a familiar existential crisis, it makes it worth it. The work paid off.

I don’t know if you need to hear (read) this, but this is your reminder to keep going. The work will pay off. Trust yourself to handle what happens next.

Love to all,

Della

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