The Path is Perfectly Yours

The sun sets behind me, reflecting in my side mirror and kissing my skin alight, as the vibrant, rolling green hills pass outside my car window.

I play songs that await me in the place I’m headed to, the sounds of big-city nightlife mismatched with the picturesque rural scenery flashing by.

Houses dot the hills. Rocking chairs dot the porches. I look to my left as the sunset transforms the green grass to gold and see two young parents sitting on their front porch steps, a newborn between them.

My heart warms at the scene, imagining the sacredness of the moment for the people turned parents.

I feel as if I am years into the future looking at a picture from a scrapbook, reflecting on what once was now that the child has become an adult. Remembering the sunsets shared as tired parents, filled with emotions that I cannot yet imagine as one who is not responsible for the creation and life of someone else.

My car continues down the road and new hills, new porches come into view. My mind remembers where I am going, and I swiftly fall into excitement.

I feel the music coming through my speakers.

I smile at my ability to feel my youth course through me.

I recognize the moment I was in and what it meant for me — I had the freedom and privilege to get away for a weekend for no reason other than my friend and I wanted to.

We were young. We didn’t have the typical obligations of many our age that prevent the ability to pack up and go without reason or plan.

I recognized that from where I stood, I craved this moment and this untethered feeling more than I craved the front porch family photo.

When I felt that realization come in, the expectations and judgments I have been working to shed slid in along with it.

The expectations that I should be doing something else, I should be “more established”, I should value stability over freedom — all the shoulds that tangle my mind, obscuring my own path and fostering comparison.

At times, I feel like an anomaly.

I look to either side, searching for others walking the same path and find myself standing alone on the winding road of my late twenties. I look but don’t find others who have, want, or value the things I do.

I know my people are out there — I find comfort from afar reading the perspectives that mirror my own.

I know the Universe will deliver what and who is needed at the time I am perfectly ready to receive it.

I know there are certain paths I must walk alone for a while, maybe to test if my direction will sway to find comfort or remain true to growth when I am seemingly the only one walking.

I know others are walking toward me, their paths not yet visible from my own, but the intersection already determined and perfectly out of sight.

I know these stretches of the journey that feel like walking alone make the ongoing practice of reassurance difficult at times.

Worth it, but difficult.

Finding the places and people of alignment is a process. It requires patience, awareness of misalignment, and ongoing redirection when that misalignment is noticed — all of which require a deliberateness to remain steadfast in when the world outside is reflecting different directions.

Knowing and understanding that this reassurance, like many things in life, is a practice, I paused and began again.

I began to reassure myself that it was okay. I was okay.

Not necessarily not wanting the family photo, but being content in its absence, its delay was okay.

It’s okay to be content with being different from what you see around you.

Our values are continuously unfolding, some malleable and some not. It’s an ongoing practice to not only identify but honor those values found within.

Sometimes it’s easy and sometimes it takes courage to follow the things that feel good to our highest self.

You have to build trust in yourself and feel stable in the foundation that is uniquely yours. And, often the process to that is a series of tests and moments, one after another until you’re ready for the next lesson or evolution.

Everything that’s yours is already done. Be content in the absence. Be content in the delay. Remember that both represent the journey that you will later look back on as leading you to all you desired.