Fog

I have to keep reminding myself that a clear way forward is the exception, not the rule, of adult life.

This is especially true for those of us who’ve stepped off the well-marked trails. Once you’ve chosen a life that doesn’t look like your contemporaries’ lives or you’ve chosen a vocation that doesn’t include a career ladder and annual pay increases, your life suddenly becomes very free… but not very clear.

Life can be foggy, and self-doubt makes things that much murkier.

Trailblazing by its very nature is dirty, slow work, full of missteps and backtracking and a fair amount of getting lost. That’s easy to overlook when you read history or the biography of an iconoclast. It’s easy to forget the others who disappeared forever and or quietly returned to the main path in defeat.

I stepped off the road a while ago, but since then I’ve been inching forward or taking tentative steps. Lately, I have been standing still, too scared to move in any direction.

What’s a restless soul to do?

Take it slow. Creating a new way of living takes time. Even if your circumstances change in a moment, you still need time to adjust. Slow is not bad. Inertia is.

Listen and look. You can’t always trust your eyes in the fog. But if you pay attention to all the signals you are getting rather than the ones you aren’t, you’ll have a plethora of information to digest.

Pause when the fog gets too thick. If the way is completely obscured, wiser action is to pause and wait for the conditions to change.

Remember that, eventually, fog will burn off. And in those moments of clarity, it will be easier — and imperative — to hustle forward.

Fog is perhaps an imperfect metaphor. All I know is that my fog has temporarily cleared, and I’m busy carving out a new space under a bright, vivid sun.