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When You’re Confused, Pay Attention to What’s Happening Inside of You
And what wants to happen around you.
You’re walking in the middle of a foggy road. You don’t know what you’re doing here. You don’t know where it leads. You may not even know how you got here.
Inside the crippling confusion lies an often barely perceptible choice. Will you go back to your panic room — the crackly old record skipping in your head, where your hurts and anxieties and fantasies replay infinitely, like a Dantean torture reel?
Or will you keep walking down the road, with your eyes and your heart open?
Here’s a hint: You will end up walking down that road, the road of discovery, of self-knowledge. The only question is whether you’ll do it screaming like a pig to slaughter, or willingly — with at least a modicum of courage, and at best a heart full of wonder.
Here’s what I try to remind myself, when I’m in That Place again.
Don’t analyze, regret, or obsess over the past. Don’t escape into some imagined future certainty. All of that mental fly-trap is clotting the reality right in front of you. Blocking your vision. Interfering with what wants to happen.
What wants to happen is the movie that’s about to start as the lights around you dim. The…