What Makes You Come Alive?

I recently rediscovered this quote by Howard Thurman, which has been so inspiring to me on my journey of following my unique path in life. This journey - though it’s been anything but easy - has taken me down so many interesting roads and helped me design an amazing life that fits me beautifully.

Now, as I enter the next phase of my path as a solopreneur, a path that often feels rocky and whose destination I can’t yet see clearly, these words are again a reminder of the bigger picture of why I’ve chosen this work, and how to navigate using my inner compass.

As someone who spent the first decade of her adulthood as an activist trying desperately to figure out what the world most needed and how to meet those needs, this quote opened my mind to a radically different perspective that changed the way I saw my role in life. It gave me the permission I needed to recenter my life around my own longings instead of around the world’s problems. Though the two have remained intertwined, I finally started allowing myself to explore options in life purely for the joy they brought me.

At first, it was hard to understand how I could justify choosing my own joy when the world around me seemed to be crumbling. The way I eventually came to understand this is best summed up in these beautiful words by Martin Luther King, Jr, who said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

I came to see that the work I do to be of service in the world isn’t so helpful when it’s coming from a place of desperation and fear. If I want to live in a world filled with love, I have to embody that love as strongly and as often as I can. And when love is what drives my work, the impact of everything I do is so much more beneficial.

I now know that the best thing I can do for the world is to shine my own light as brightly as I can. To trust that there’s a universal intelligence working for the greater good and that trusting my inner aliveness is the best way to contribute to it.

The life that’s been emerging since I adopted this thinking is so much more aligned with who I really am, instead of who I thought the world needed me to be. Or who I thought I needed to be in order to become worthy.

If I can follow my inner guide and the twists and turns that intuitively feel right to me, and if I can trust the magic and mystery of what wants to happen through me, then what unfolds will be exactly what is meant to. And there’s no bigger gift that I can offer to the world.