Your efforts will help create a trail for others. – Denis Linn
Sometimes we go through life with blinkers on. We don’t see the how or ask why, we just keep on keeping on. Then there are the times when questions come that won’t settle for later and refuse to be pushed aside. These questions need to be answered now and they need our honest answer. Often this bare-boned reckoning requires a bit of soul searching. It requires getting down to the work we’ve been letting our busy lives postpone.
The thing is, in the long run we answer these questions for others as much as we answer them for ourselves. And when we have a breakthrough or see cloudy situations with more clarity it’s not only for us, it’s for all of us. Because the truth is we are all connected in ways we don’t even realize and each of us has the capacity to lead the way into uncharted territory. Whether you’re standing in front of a million people or surrounded by your circle of close friends doesn’t matter. Faithfully answering the deepest, darkest questions life poses can’t help but help everyone else.
Somehow the light we cultivate within travels on and touches others in ways we can’t possibly know. Creating more of this lightness, deeper understanding, and greater clarity within ourselves miraculously and mysteriously creates a kind of light for others to see by when they stumble and fall. This is exactly why each of our efforts are so important and necessary for the greater whole. We’re all in it together and can help each other out when we are consciously engaged in our own lives with the questions that are brought to our doorstep. We do our best to answer the hard questions, the questions that break our hearts, and the questions that make us take another look at who we really are.
This makes me think of the hundredth monkey story. What one monkey figured out, that washing the sand off of a sweet potato before eating it tasted better, became a natural impulse in all monkeys after enough of them were taught what to do. That unspoken information then rippled out in ways we can’t quite understand and after the hundredth monkey was shown what to do there came a natural tipping point. Now that information was out in the ethers and just picked up on by the other monkeys. This information didn’t need to be taught anymore, it was just known to all. This is where the magic comes in, where all the things we don’t understand, and perhaps will never understand, come into play about just how deeply we are all connected.
This same magic applies to us and all the lessons life teaches. What each of us goes through is not for nothing. What we feel and figure out is never a waste. And when enough of us have figured out how to love ourselves, trust ourselves, and be kind to ourselves the same tipping point will come. Many more will follow our lead whether we come into direct contact with them or not. The kind of energy this self-love, self-awareness, and self-care creates ripples out until all of us pick up on it and just begin doing it in our everyday lives with barely a second thought. Then self-love, self-care, compassion, and expanded consciousness become the norm rather than the anomaly.
It makes all the work worth it.
kb
