Tunnel Blind…

How do you define life?

I read once that your answer will impact how you live your life, and it forced me to stop and think. How do I define life? A word immediately came to mind.

Journey.

That thought has resurfaced many times in one form or another over the last couple of months. I unintentionally set out on the path to publication three years ago. It has been a winding path that I don’t always feel I have navigated successfully.

I’m realizing that is the problem: my view of success… something I have predominately defined by others’ acceptance.

Now, I know that for me to become published, someone has to like my work, and then someone, hopefully many someones, have to purchase it. I don’t want those many someones to only be people in my circle of friends and family. I want to impact a large number of people, and if I am truly impacting people with my words, then my words are going to resonate with a variety of people. Including people I have never met.

That means the destination of this writing journey is becoming a published author who impacts the world on a global scale.

That’s a big dream, and it took a lot of guts to actually place those words on this page, but that is my “why.” In pursuit of this “why,” I am learning about life and people, and more importantly, about myself. Honestly, I don’t always like some of the truths I uncover. Truths that challenge beliefs buried deep within me.

In the creation process, an artist comes in contact with her buried beliefs. Whether words, pictures, or melodies, those beliefs bubble up and overflow into a creation. That part of the process is what I fell in love with.

I love creating something from an unidentified place within me. I love it so much that I want to share it with others.

Everything changed when I had to accept that not everyone was going to like what I created. That fact created a wall of fear—an irrational fear that no one would like my writing.

Feelings of inadequacy developed. The process was no longer joyful but frightening. I stopped writing. I stopped doing what made me happy. I was too caught up in others’ acceptance instead of the journey.

I knew I needed to reorient myself away from focusing on acceptance and towards experiencing the journey. The first thing I had to do was define what “journey” meant to me.

When I think of a journey, I think of something that takes a while. It’s not a trip; that, to me, is about experiencing the destination. A journey is more like a series of stops and starts along a path to a destination.

Maybe that is why journey came to mind when I defined life.

Life is a series of stops and starts, a path we all travel with our own destination in mind. Along the way, we encounter various people and experiences.

The people and experiences are what make up the journey.

If I challenged you to stop right now and reflect on your life, I could almost bet your reflections would focus on people and experiences. You’d think not of goals or destinations you were working towards, but the people and experiences en route to those goals and destinations.

This is wisdom I would do well to heed. I have always been a goal-setter, tunnel blind to my surroundings while pursing the destination. I rush to get to the good stuff when the good stuff is already around me.

My path to publication has been full of people and experiences. People I would have never met had I not continued to write.

Remember those belief systems I mentioned earlier? Each of the people and experiences I have encountered along my journey has in some way validated or challenged my beliefs. It’s not just my writing that’s changing—I am being formed in this process. It is my hope that it is for the better.

My journey is not over yet. That winding path still stretches out in front of me, taunting me with the light of publication at the arbitrary end—an end that will become overshadowed by the next goal I create in its place, and that goal, just like the one before it, is just another point in the distance to distract me from all the people, places, and events impacting me now.

Life begins not at the end, but with every step I take right now.

I hope you will join me on this journey so that together, we can point out the important details along the path.

I leave you with a parting question: How do you define life?

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