Day 70: Why is it that opportunities are often clothed in the best camo to match the terrain in which they hide? It feels to me that the path that is “meant to be” is always covered with brush and takes pruning to clear it in order to see if it’s even a path at all… It’s never obvious and it almost never has giant fluorescent lights coaxing you in the right direction. It can feel as if finding the right opportunity is the same as an animal stumbling into a blind trail set you left out for an entire season, playing more to luck than skill.
And boy is that tiring. A lifetime of searching, pruning, and redirecting in order to find the one “true path.” The path that brings the fulfillment, the paycheck, and the joy. A path that at times seems near but more often feels obscured by the tools being used to cut that path… the tools that often take more than they give… things like the social media, zoom, and other techno-first requirements of today’s world that feel more like a sedative than a life enhancer.
So, how do we know if we are even meandering in the right direction? Well, my current hypothesis is that no, we cannot know if our natural wanderlust will ultimately be fruitful. But, we can certainly lean on two things to give confidence in finding our predestined path. One is covering the basics of mental land navigation and the second is faith.
For the former, I have a mental walking cadence just like I do for physical land navigation… In the physical world, I know it takes me roughly 76 normal stride steps to travel 400m and I can count those out when I am trying to find a mark in the woods. That also tells me how far away I am from my origin point if I start to go astray or input the wrong destination… allowing me to quickly get back to the starting line if need be. I’ve built out something similar in my mind to help keep my bearings when I go down a new or unknown path… think of it like leaving a trail of breadcrumbs and having an escape hatch.
As for the second part, faith, this is still a relatively new one for me. Yes, I have always been someone who believed in faith and fate, but I was always driven more by ego and the need to control situations. Hindsight being what it is, it’s clear that many of my past “successes” which I took the credit for were more me stumbling on to my path and claiming that I had been out looking the whole time. But, readjusting my attitude to recognize that there is an element to this whole thing that is out of my control (a difficult thing for a type-a person like me to do) has helped in fostering an overall recalibration of my mental state.
Stay vigilant in your search for opportunity, build a strong mental fortitude to trudge through the jungle, and keep your faith as a north star.
Daily Prompt: What is the most difficult part in your ability to unearth opportunity? Are you stumbling on fools gold? Or, maybe you aren’t even looking? Sit and evaluate what your biggest hold up is in uncovering your own path to success:
Motivational Passage:
Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or terrified because of them, for the Lord your God goes with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you.
Deuteronomy 31:6
Rewilding Action: I believe that most of the folks reading this blog hold a desire to disconnect from the status quo of suburban life… With that mindset it could be easy to turn a blind eye to some of the bills that are introduced (and thankfully struck down in most instances) within our federal government. Without sounding like an alarmist, there was a bill recently introduced that could threaten the ability of folks with a preparedness mindset to congregate and train. This bill (broadly speaking) contains loose language that would restrict the number of people that can get together to train in anything related to combatives… which could apply to the most apparent things like shooting at a gun range, but could also include sports like jiu jitsu or even wrestling. As part of our self-sustained vigilance ethos, we should all be keeping a close eye on what is being proposed in congress that could make the exchange of information we are sharing here more difficult: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3589/text