Unknown

“If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.” -Oscar Wilde

Maybe our purpose isn’t just one aspect of life.

Growing up we were always asked, what do you want to be when you grow up?, and the majority of the time we had an answer: teacher, firefighter, doctor, lawyer, etc. All admirable professions.

I had an answer too. Teacher or actress.

But then Life happened and I came to slowly realize that maybe I’m more. Maybe we’re all more.

I’m more than just the one thing I thought I had to be.

As time went on, I was one of those people that didn’t know what or who they wanted to be (still am). And with the way society (and family) is set up, I looked at that as a negative. Not knowing that it was okay for me to be unsure about where I wanted to go in Life.

We were engrained to always have a plan. We have to know what to do next. We have to be ready for everything. We have to know what profession we are reaching for. But that’s not the way Life works.

The unsure place of Life is not something that we should be ashamed of. Our purpose here is all encompassing. Whatever plan we had as children, or even as adults, that changed over time is not anything to beat yourself up over.

Reinventing yourself over and over again doesn’t mean you have no path or guidance, it just means you are open to everything Life has to offer, beautiful and ugly, and the not knowing is a beautiful place because we can create what we want. I believe we are scared of the unknown because it has been indoctrined in us to always be prepared and if we are not prepared then things will go awry. There is some truth to that, but how many times has Life not gone as planned?

We are crticized for going with the flow. It’s looked at as being irresponsible and immature to just go with whatever Life hands us. The lack of control is what is scary to most. It can cause so much strife within us and have us not look at it as a way to start over or as a blank canvas. We always feel like we have to either be one thing or do one thing in order to feel secure and safe.

But as I’ve heard recently, we are verbs, not nouns. We just are. We can do. We can create a Life that’s not within the confines of what we thought we had to be.

Waking up every morning and wanting to do something new or learn something new is finding yourself. We find ourselves everyday. It’s a never ending, beautiful journey of self-discovery.

Because we are allowed to just be. To not be sure. To not know. To just…move.

We are vast. Not fixed. And we’ve forgotten that.

And sometimes the not knowing is where all of the answers lie.