Life is fraught with risk all the way down the line. But it is important to pursue what gives you pleasure, meaning, and purpose. There are those moments along the way when you will hear the call. It is important to heed the call and risk at moments like that. These opportunities are not likely to happen twice.
There is a lot we repress along the way and this can build up. Things we ought to say and do sometimes.
But always it is your gut instinct you should listen to since you yourself will be the final arbiter of what incoming/arising information is relevant and true for you, as well as what you most need and want. Doing what others or society tells you can be a big and sometimes long mistake. There will be no shortage of others to tell you how to live, but few that will know you as well as you know yourself and what works best for you. In any case, roles imposed by others can be/come very restrictive. Far better to just be yourself or true to yourself/your core as Hamlet said.
The divine and eternal often end up as chosen projections or externals beyond the self. In fact, the divine and the eternal are to be found and known within the individual and others. As for the eternal, one need look no further than nature and William Blake’s lines from “Auguries of Innocence”:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand/And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,/Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand/And Eternity in an hour.
And as Joseph Campbell has remarked, when we serve others, we are in service to the spirit which lives within others. It is important to remember, at the same time, that we have to serve and take care of the spirit within ourselves. That is our own very important obligation so as to avoid withering up and dying in various ways.
Each of us has a very unique road to travel which is our own. So, though we may be like others or have kindred spirits, it is our ‘mission’ and fate to go much of the day and life alone. Many days there will seem to be no clear route, but often if one keeps walking, the road thus created is the one we were meant to take.
As I’ve said in one of the first blog entries (“Conferring the Meanings of One’s Own Life”), we are the final arbiters of the meaning and purpose of our own lives. We decide what the true or final meanings of our lives will be, no one else. As the cliche goes, we have to (be able to) live with ourselves. There is finally a courage and integrity to this lifelong process.
But in later life, there might be a rightness to letting go, yielding, and accepting changes and other possibilities. In that, a rightness that may be conducive to freeing one’s perpetually restless heart, soul , and oneself beyond ‘normal’, the conventional, or one’s beliefs and expectations. Freeing the mind, heart, and spirit to/for larger living and larger states of consciousness, meaning and purpose. Again, risky and adventurous, but not out of sync with following one’s own bliss, as Campbell put it. (One does have to break eggs in order to make an omelette.)