As I sat there with my iced chai, we found two chairs in the corner and decided to talk.
And I think I did it again.
“No no no. You don’t have anything to explain. Why are you still explaining?” He said in his slightly goofy way.
I laughed a little. Both out of slight embarrassment, but also the acknowledgment of what I knew already: I wasn’t supposed to know what to do when a parent dies. I’m not even supposed to know what to do when the other loses their vision at 60.
I wasn’t supposed to know how to pay the bills. To take care of a house. To know how the hell my career was supposed to move forward when I couldn’t pick up the pieces of a family slowly falling apart.
So why did I expect myself to?
Life has thrown a fair bit at me at 26.
An older gentleman told me that at a party yesterday. And it’s pretty comforting hearing that because, well, I’ve spent a fair amount of time beating myself up about not knowing exactly what to do.
The problem, I think, is that we often look at life like it’s so black and white. When, in reality, rarely anything goes according to plan. Most things, in hindsight, are far more nuanced than we give them credit for.
There are very few easy choices. There is no perfect plan. And there is certainly no paradise.
What I have found more empowering lately, however, is just the concept of doing the best that you can. The idea of prioritizing progress over perfection. The idea that when you feel like you’re stuck in a rut, some kind of movement is necessary. Whether that’s a physical one, a mental one or a slight one.
And so I find myself in that place. Accepting gradual change. Accepting movement. Accepting flow. Accepting that, in reality, I have very little control over a great number of things. That, at the end of the day, you do the best to improve yourself — you work at it — you grind, but you let go of the outcome.
You let go of an exact plan. You realize that you don’t have to know exactly what to do. Or where to be. Or what you should be doing. Instead, you just do.
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A version of this post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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