Our Unfolding Path
This week, my voice will sound a bit like I ate a basket of pinecones, but I assure you I feel much better than I sound. In a few days, I’ll be back to normal, whatever normal might be.
For now, lean with me into today’s consideration of our ever-unfolding path. I think you’ll be glad you did.
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It’s been said that better questions lead us naturally to better answers, and that it’s in not knowing that we open the doorway to knowing. I’m Scott Lennox and you’re listening to The Beautiful Question, a consideration of things that truly matter in a complex world.
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The things that happen in our lives can seem completely random or disconnected, yet, without trying to sound particularly mystical, are they?
Join me this week as we consider how the path of our lives continues to unfold—sometimes in surprising ways.
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While looking through one of my journals, I recently came across an entry I find particularly relevant right now.
Today, as the season continues its slow changes, I recognize that things have a way of working out in my life. Just as the rest of nature opens and reveals itself one step at a time—one moment at a time—my own path is gradually unfolding in front of me. It’s true, even when I can’t see it or feel it or understand it.
Because of that, I’m free to let go of my self-imposed pressures to accomplish or perform or do it perfectly. I’m free to stop holding back and free to stop pushing too hard. I’m free to pause for as long as I need or want so that I can catch my breath or clear my head. Free to regain my balance. Free to simply rest and savor my life. Free to do nothing if that’s what I need in the well-lived moment.
When I remember that and I’m dancing in harmony with it, there’s no way I can get it wrong. The path itself will lead me.
from the author’s daily journal
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Over the years—and the past two years especially—I’ve become increasingly aware that I don’t have to see the path in front of me in order to take the steps I need to take. I just need to take them. As I simply step out, the path will naturally unfold. The truth is, I couldn’t see most of the steps that brought me to where I am now until after I had taken them. And it was only much later that I began to see the order and the patterns my seemingly wandering steps had formed.
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Some time ago, I watched a video of a Monarch butterfly emerging from its chrysalis. As a caterpillar, it had grown fatter every day as it gorged itself on milkweed leaves. Then, at exactly the right time, it stopped eating, crawled up to the underside of a stem and attached itself there. Once the attachment was complete, it formed a chrysalis around itself, and a process took place that was so mysterious, it seemed like alchemy.
In about two weeks, the chrysalis changed color and became translucent. What had once been a voraciously hungry caterpillar emerged as an elegant butterfly that took its time as it hung upside down and extended its wings to dry in the sun.
The narrator explained that programmed into the butterfly’s tiny brain was the guidance it needed to fly from Canada to Mexico, which it was about to do.
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Looking back at my own life, I can see that even when I thought I was lost or in peril, something for my highest good was naturally unfolding. Just like the cycles of life in the Monarch, where no one told it what to do, my own life was following something quietly encoded into it.
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Self-Portrait (graphite): Scott Lennox
Self-Portrait (graphite): Scott Lennox
When I was three years old, if you had described to me the world I now inhabit, it would have seemed like science fiction or pure fantasy, and I would not have believed you. And had you insisted that I explain to you how I was going to take myself from where I stood, there on the island of Guam, to where I am now, I could not possibly have expressed or understood a word of it.
Yet here I am today with my feet squarely planted in this world and this time. And surely, I am no less transformed or transmuted than that once-hungry caterpillar that emerged as a butterfly.
I know my own history quite well, but I’d be hard-pressed to explain the hidden order that got me this precise moment and my ability to share this podcast with you. What I can tell you, and with great confidence, is that the arc of my life was not drawn or laid out by the pens of chaos or happenstance or sheer coincidence. There’s been a choreography to all of it.
I’m thinking now of that line in Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Less Traveled. I have to agree with him when he wrote: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by.”
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This week’s three Beautiful Questions have not so much to do with whether or not there has been a Divine orchestration to your life, but where you stand with it as it is, and where you choose to go from where you are.
Question One: Accepting your life exactly as it is right now, in what direction (if any) do you give yourself unbridled permission to go next? (From where you are, what’s your next move?)
Question Two: If you were to give a name to the arc or pattern of your life, what would you call it?
Question Three: Along the way, what unexpected, good things have come from some of your struggles or challenges?
After you’ve pondered them, I’d love to hear what thoughts arise for you. Write and tell me about them.
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As I say each week,
My Light with Your Light!
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Thank you for joining me in these podcasts as we keep doing the things we can to respond to life in increasingly effective ways. As always, I’m open to your comments and feedback.
You can be further inspired by visiting my friends at Kosmos Journal. That’s K O S M O S Journal. Their mission is to inform, inspire, and engage global transformation in harmony with all life. You can easily find them online at Kosmos Journal dot O R G.
And at thebeautifulquestion.com, you can read the illustrated transcript of each podcast as you listen. You’ll also find an archive of all previous podcasts, including episodes three and four, guided relaxation audios that can help you practice letting go on a daily basis.
If you find these podcasts useful, don’t hesitate to share them or tell others about them. That’s a great way of helping me get a voice of calm and collaboration and balance and encouragement out into the world.
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I’m Scott Lennox, and this has been The Beautiful Question.
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The Beautiful Question is a One Light production, written, produced, and engineered by Scott Lennox at HeartRock Studios in Fort Worth, Texas, as a way of paying forward to life, being fully present, becoming better engaged with things that truly matter in a complex world, and committing to a healthier future for all of us.