There are two paths before you.

Most people don’t choose. They stand still. In never stepping into their power, they become the tools of those that do.

In choosing between the two paths before you, in embarking beyond this fork in the road, you become a sovereign being. You stop being only effected and start affecting your environment.

The first of these two paths is glittering with gold. It promises to give you everything you can imagine: fame, wealth, success, and a never-ending line of adoration. The price of this path is pretty straight forward: your soul. What? You don’t want it badly enough? Don’t you know that success requires sacrifice?

I have a confession to make: I have walked this path of darkness. Driven by a desire for power and the security it promised to provide, I worked for a man who was anything but trustworthy, but who demanded absolute trust from anyone who had the honor of working with him.

The process of grooming me for this manipulation took him over a year. He attended my publicly hosted meetups and positioned himself as an intelligent, business-savy mentor—someone willing to provide guidance to me along my uncertain path as an ambitious 19-year-old without direction.

After one of my first meetups he attended, he pulled me aside, said that he believed in me, and that he wanted to invest thousands of dollars in helping me start a design business.

After a few more conversations, he dropped off the face of the earth. I didn’t hear from him for six months. When he eventually re-surfaced, he asked me, “Did you learn your lesson?”

I went to a psychic a while ago. Simply guided by curiosity, I didn’t have any specific concerns, but I left with a bad taste in my mouth.

She didn’t say anything explicitly bad, but I walked in expecting a discussion and reflection on life, while what I got were some shallow predictions about general improvements to my life that did not impress me.

We have a tendency to view the future as static, fixed, and mostly removed from our control. There’s a tendency to view reality with the cold detachment of a scientific researcher: as if everything can be reduced to the goofy meaningless randomness of colliding atoms that is, again, outside of the control of us mere mortals.

This is such a powerless world-view to have. It makes us wrought with worry and anxiety; as if we are wandering through a thick fog, and anything we stumble upon, be it a million dollars, or a deadly fall off a cliff, would be a total accident.

Luckily, this powerless worldview is entirely optional.

Over two months ago I packed my little car to the brim with my belongings, and roadtripped with a beloved 3,000 miles, catching many a landmark and animal crossing in between.

It was my first roadtrip to the West coast, jam-packed with activities like hiking, horseback riding in a national park, visiting sacred sites, and the like. An exhilarating, albeit exhausting trip (I may have broke down sobbing multiple times, but more on that later) that I will no doubt be dripping with inspiration from for the rest of my life.

I was looking forward to the end of the exhaustion. The schedule and budget was tight, so most nights were spent sleeping in the car. I hardly remember driving through the whole state of Colorado, fatigue combined with my anxiety about cliff driving* has made the memories fuzzy.

This week I traveled 3,000 miles, the farthest away I’ve been from home, diagonally across the country from the east coast of Florida to the west coast of Washington. I am writing this post from Seattle.

It is beautiful here. Everywhere I turn, the view looks like a postcard. Pictures don’t do it justice.

I was expecting to come to a city and be overwhelmed with infrastructure, the lack of nature, and the accompanying impatience of its inhabitants. Luckily, my expectations have been thrown for a loop.

From sending out the post I last wrote, Community Events, I got a response from a meditation teacher, and learned some hard lessons.

I was making assumptions about how many people were attending events just from the number of RSVPs on Facebook or Meetup. But as the practitioner who responded to me pointed it out–this is often not the case. While looking at an event online where attendance appears to be low, in person there are a lot of regular attendees that simply don’t bother using the online system. He has popular events that sell out every month with 20-50 people, but you wouldn’t know that by looking online.

I was making assumptions based in ignorance and not in experience. This is a youthful habit that has burned me before, and I want to break it. I want to stop assuming that I know more than I do, and instead be more receptive to learning. I want to stop being so judgemental and instead live more from a place of appreciation and in the moment.

Coincidental Cynicism

It was interesting getting his response later in a day when I was so inspired by the animator who made this video.