How do you choose your next steps? Do you make choices based on “what everyone else is doing”? Do you listen to what “they” say? Or, do you step out of the mainstream and listen to the calling of your heart and soul for guidance?
In my early days of writing songs, this lyric spilled out:
Follow My Soul
I’ve traveled in the city and followed other’s steps.
I’ve done each task before me. My life: a success.
I’ve learned well, for I thought all life’s answers were taught.
Now I’m starting over to dream in the clover – I hear new questions again.
The questions that are with me each day and through the night
sometimes send fear straight through me. I know not wrong from right.
Yet I know I must go through this uncertain time
and be with the feeling, as the Unknown’s revealing to me a new way to grow.
Now I’m living with the questions. I’m moving in the flow.
At times I ask direction, yet often I know
that the way, I would go is not the path I’ve been shown.
Yet, I’m gonna go there; follow my soul where my heart it knows my truth.
The second verse, added later, was especially true for me. It was very scary to depart from the clear right/wrong guidance I’d received growing up. Yet, continuing to live as I’d been shown no longer felt good, satisfying or fulfilling. Of course I had learned much and taken many positive steps by practicing what I’d been taught. Yet, I wasn’t giving the best I could to this world by following “your path”. I have come to believe that we are meant to build upon what we learn, to stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before, and to make the world a better place by adding our unique essence to it.
This lyric, from the band, Cloud Cult, adds another dimension. Not only are we capable of following our own path but the pathmaker – that leader we are following, that guide we have entrusted with our life – just might be tricking us:
God gave you brains, now don’t go and drown in your own thinkings.
God gave you hands so you could pick up your broken pieces.
God gave you feet so you can find your own way home.
Let’s run away, just know your troubles tend to follow.
Pack your bags, just know that everything here’s borrowed.
The pathmaker is a trickster, so make your own damn road.
To the Great Unknown ~ Cloud Cult
Who else can really know what’s right for you?
Who else has walked every step in life with you?
What do you need to find the courage to follow your soul?