The Gathering: Getting Lost and Finding Our Way.

Apr 3, 2016
2 min read

Good Morning! Thank you for joining me for the first Gathering of April! Hopefully that means that us here in Canada are passed the worst of the cold, and the rainy days are the assurance of those warm, long days ahead.

This week, I want to talk about the reoccurring event of finding our way and finding ourselves. Whether you’re embarking on this for the first real time, or have been down this kind of road a hundred times, I think we have something valuable to discuss here.

When you’re little, the world and everything around you is unchartered territory. You have a vision in your mind of what your life will look like, and getting there seems pretty straightforward. But there comes a time, for some earlier than others, when start to see the veil lift and start to get a glimpse at what life might really be about, and about how hard we’re going to have to work to get there. Not just career, or lifestyle choices, but some days even just getting out of bed, or dealing with a loss or a betrayal.

For me, the journey of finding myself began when I was sixteen. For that was when I realized that you didn’t just get to keep yourself, you had to work on yourself. This was when I realized that I had lost myself, and this was a defining moment for me being found.

Realizing you are lost for the first time is much like actually being lost for the first time. When you wandered too far in the department store from your mother and suddenly found yourself all turned around. There’s a panic. A complete unfamiliar. A realization.

You have all of these thoughts in your head, but none of them seem to make any sense and the ones that kind of do, you have no idea if they are the right or wrong ones.

This changes though, as you get older, as you get more experience, as you get to know yourself more deeply. There is an understanding that, while it may be painful now – whatever it is that you’re going through that is making you feel...lost; that is has meaning, has purpose, and that focusing on the solutions rather than the problems, really does get us farther.

But this is a reoccurring event. Yes, it changes. But we get lost, fail, have to pick ourselves up and rebuild, over and over. Sometimes it is not as drastic as the last; sometimes it is just different. We get things on track we feel like we’re making some good progress and feel good about our choice, and then bam! We’re back off track again. Finding our way, is about the way. Finding ourselves is never-ending. So keep trying. Keep rebuilding. These are not the kind of things they teach us in school. How to actually live. We have to learn on our feet and match the efforts against us with as much force.