Take the first step in faith. You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have learned that to adhere to ‘stickability’, you have to know yourself enough to know what you want to stick at. I continue to believe that when you find your own unique place in the world, you will automatically be driven to ‘stick’ with it, to keep going even when it’s hard or unpleasant, to commit for better or worse because there is nothing else for you, because what you do is driven by who you are and who you essentially need to be.
I had been thinking about going back to Med School. I think because my head had been going overtime and I needed an easy answer. I need to know that my life is worth something, that it has meaning in some way, some purpose. I think Med School seems like an easy panacea for me – it’s like a ready-made purpose all wrapped up in social acceptability, so that I wouldn’t have to think anymore, wouldn’t have to keep asking the question – not just who but why am I?!
I came to the conclusion that going back to Med School was rather more running from the question than moving towards the answer. Flailing about in the unknown, the blank slate of unknown purpose, I gravitated back to that which seemed a nice, neat definition for me, something to make my life make sense.
But Emily’s Quest is about living and loving the questions in the faith, hope and trust that I will somehow live my way into the answer. And so I am going to embrace the unknown and keep asking the question into the darkness, in the faith that one day I will look around and realise I am living the answer already and always have been.
So in a way I was right about this year being about stickability, but not in the way I thought. It’s not about sticking to an arbitrary sense of external validation and definition, but rather about sticking true to that little voice in my soul that urges me on and learning to just be with it long enough to really hear what it is saying, not trying to cover it over with easy solutions and quick-fix bandaids.
For some reason, that little voice – that is not really a voice at all but a sense, a knowning, an urging – has been pulling me for a long time towards Australia, and in particular Sydney. Don’t ask me why or what I even mean by that – it’s just there.
So, I am finally, finally, finally, just going to have the guts to just bloody do it. Enough talking, enough thinking, enough questioning of motives. I am currently in almost exactly the same situation that I have been at least two other times in my life. I talking exactly the same right down to where I’m working and where I’m living. There is a pattern repeating in my life and I recognise the place I am at with much familiarity. And you know what they say about what happens if you ‘always do what you’ve always done…’
So I am making a difference choice this time. I am (hopefully!) breaking the pattern. How lucky I am to live in a life where I get to choose again. The first two times I chose wrong. So life as brought me back the exact same situation and now I get to choose again.
This time I choose the fear, I choose the excitement, I choose the small voice inside of me that won’t be drowned out, I choose the absolute unknown and the vastness of the world ahead of me, I choose to dance with the questions of life.
I am terrified. I am excited. I am alive!
Sydney here I come!
