Hey there! I have taken quite a long break from my newsletter as I was experiencing a lot of mental turmoil that led me to re-evaluate my life completely. In the last 11 months, I changed jobs, sectors, continents & countries. I moved from Luxembourg to Egypt and started a completely different life.
This change almost felt like a write of passage from a life that was led by fear to one that is led by curiosity and a deep knowing that comes from creating an intimate relationship with myself. I came to Egypt with a short term contract not knowing how my life would like in six months when my contract ends. This was my first dance with the unknown.
Society gives us a prescribed path in life. We work hard in school to go to university. We do your best there to get a good job and start climbing the latter. We try to earn more, buy more, create a family, go higher and higher in status. A life formula proven to create miserable adults but we go along with it anyway because first, we can’t imagine any other alternative and second, we are not comfortable with the unknown. Paul Millerd calls this “the default path”. The path is somewhat clear and everybody else is walking it so it feels safe. He mentions his friend Ranjit Saimbi in his book “Pathless Path”, who has left law to pursue software development.
“A career in the law signalled to others that he “was a serious and intelligent person.” But the longer he spent on the path, he realized that the real promise had been that “life’s existential fears are traded for certainty.”
He suggests an alternative to default path: “pathless path”. What would it look like for us to embrace the uncertainty and unknown? What would it look like for us to recognise that uncertainty is not a problem to be solved? Pathless path is a call to adventure, to take one’s curiosities seriously while possessing a playful attitude towards life. This reminds me of my favourite quote:
Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
Hellen Keller
Recognising that there were people walking the pathless path and creating authentic lives completely changed my perspective of reality. Default Path started to lose it’s grasp on me. Day by day I started to notice my energy being sucked at work. I was playing a game that was not mine- which required a lot of will. I started questioning whether just being in Europe and having stability was worth this disconnect I felt from aliveness. I had genuine interest in contributing to the world with my time, knowledge, perspective which was not satisfied with my job at all.
A part of me who was attached to the default story was dying and it felt excruciating. I was filled with fear and anxiety of not knowing what else I could do. I was filled with frustration and anger because I just couldn’t leave my job without a plan. A lot of limiting beliefs popped up. I felt selfish and spoiled to want more than stability as a Turkish girl who was lucky enough to find a job in Europe. I kept on telling myself that I should have been just grateful for I have.
I felt an urgency to change my circumstances. I wanted to walk the pathless path right away, I wanted to escape my reality. I now realise I was unfulfilled in my life and wanted to feel what Paul got to feel on a daily basis: curiosity & aliveness. I demonised my current situation of employment and fell into the trap of “ arrival fallacy”. If only, I got to be self employed then I was gonna be okey. I was thinking about leaving my job without a plan and go back to Türkiye.
What happened next was completely unexpected. I received an email from someone I haven’t talked in two years about a position they were opening in Cairo. I was gonna do what I was doing in private sector but for a big humanitarian organisation with a purpose I believed in. I was going to be able to save money, get to experience a completely different culture, be of service to others with my time and as well have time to pursue my creative and personal interests. The minute I saw the e-mail, I had this deep knowing that I was going to Egypt.
Which led to the biggest breakthrough I had in my journey: “Believing that there is a bigger intelligence and script at play that you can trust and surrender. Knowing that everything happens exactly how it is supposed to happen and each part of the journey is as valuable and alive as the next one.”
Couple of months ago someone asked me this:
Imagine your life as a movie and you can fast forward to any moment in your life, which one would you like to fast forward?
And I realised I don’t want a fast forward to my journey anymore. I am excited about the process of life unfolding. Life’s lessons are hidden inside moments and they start to reveal themselves one by one when we are ready to receive them. We can stop waiting to arrive and realise we are exactly where we are supposed to be and doing exactly what we are supposed to be doing. We can believe that the higher intelligence/universe is at least benevolent and maybe even has our best interest in heart. We will all get little nudges towards truth whether it is in the shape of an unexpected e-mail, a sudden realisation during a walk or a person that enters our life at the exact time we need it.
This change of perspective on life allowed me to:
Take turtle steps without high expectations on outcomes. We can let go some of the control we so desperately want to have on outcomes and simply act.
Be compassionate. We can be gentle with ourselves, because we are growing at our own rate and that is okey.
Be comfortable with unknown. We can develop a deep trust with universe. Things will always work out and we will always be okey at the end.
Cultivate patience. We can hold it in our hearts the knowing that things will come to us in the right moment.
Did this change of perspective made me lose motivation to do things I wanted to do in life? No, on the contrary, without the heavy weight of expectations and stories, I am able to take small actions in a sustainable manner. Because fallbacks or failures don’t make me question my future. I know things will work out at the end and I am going at my own pace. I am excited about the everyday decisions, wins, losses, lessons in this unfolding.
For my first newsletter back, I wanted to write about the one change of perspective that had the biggest impact in my journey so far in hopes to ignite a small spark in you to question your lens through which you see the world. Do you think things will go off the rails if you release your grasp of reality a tiny bit? Do you feel the resistance - urgency energies pop up in your actions towards your goals? Does your main response to unknown & uncertainty is fear? Or is there a little voice whispering words of curiosity and compassion in your ears? How does believing that there is a higher intelligence to life and things will always fall into place make you feel?
I have come to believe that all perspectives are subjective and there is no one true way of perceiving the world. Believing that my life will crumble into pieces if I went off script made me be afraid of life, thus unable to act. Believing everything is exactly as it should be and everything always falls into place made me excited -curious - alive and unexpectedly motivated.
I am so excited to be back and to follow my joy. There isn’t many things that light me up as much as finding fellow curious people online who are having their own journeys with curiosity & fear. You can expect me to come back to your inboxes as frequently as possible.
And surprisingly, although I haven’t send out a single word in the last 1.5 years, now there are people in my subscriber list that I don’t know personally, which is really exciting!
So, if you would like to meet and grab a virtual coffee, you can book a slot here.
If you want to give feedback please send me a quick note on fluxbysinem@gmail.com.