Sometimes, I lose faith in my path.

Well, to be honest, I often lose faith in my path.

I question whether the goals I’m pursuing and the decisions I’m making are the right ones. When life doesn’t shower you with rewards, it can be tempting to fall into a victim mindset:

Why is this happening to me?

Why haven’t I seen the results I was expecting?

There’s a tendency to blame others, or even the universe itself.

If you (the universe) didn’t want me to do this, or that, then why make me care about these things in the first place? What kind of sick setup would have someone feel like they should be doing things and then not give them the means or opportunities to do so?

It’s really easy to fall into this type of thinking. I do it too. But with some perspective, I soon realise how self-involved this type of spiralling rabbit hole is.

I like the expression: Life doesn’t always give you what you want, but it always gives you what you need.

I think there’s so much truth to this. When I look back over my life so far, I’ve done very little of what I expected of myself when I was younger. And yet, it feels right somehow. It’s like my experiences have been building me towards something important. Even if that something ends up not being what I would have picked for myself, it still feels like the entire process has some meaning that lies just beyond my ability to comprehend it logically.

In this way, I guess you could say, on a good day, I do have faith in the universe. Maybe I don’t understand it, maybe I don’t like it, but sometimes I get glimmers of revelation—small moments that strike me as reminders to keep the faith in what I’m doing and where life is choosing to lead me.

A big-picture way of looking at it is that you can’t not be who you are. It’s impossible. You were born with a specific temperament and into certain conditions that have moulded you. Of course, it’s within your power to try and make the best decisions you can despite these conditions, but at the end of the day, most of what happens to you is beyond your control. Personally, I don’t see that as a negative. I see it as freeing in a way.

If you think about it, nature is totally in control—it always has been. And I’m not talking about nature as in trees, grass, and clouds. These are a part of nature, but so is everything else. Everything that exists in the universe is natural. It becomes natural by the very fact of its existence. And that means that you're also natural. We look at a tree, or a stone, or a feeling like anger, or sadness, or a chocolate bar wrapper, or some bird shit, and we tend to see it as something completely other than ourselves, but where exactly is the line that separates those things from us?

That line is imaginary.

We like to think of ourselves as removed onlookers. However as part of existence, we are also existence itself, in its totality. Therefore, we are the tree, the stone, the anger, the sadness, the chocolate bar wrapper, and yes, even the bird shit.

Well, if this is true, and we’re literally identical to the very universe that we curse for not providing us with the life we want, the whole thing becomes a bit of a farce. The universe moves with intelligence, and if we’re also that intelligence, then we’re intelligence complaining about how intelligent we are. It’s like the right arm cursing the body for working out too much, despite this action being the very thing that makes the entire body healthy, including the right arm.

The point I’m attempting to get at here is that it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and our place within it. With this in mind, what a good life really requires is a faith that we, the universe, are always walking the right path, no matter how wrong, or hard done by, or useless we feel.

And yes, I’m also aware that my life has been pretty good so far. And I’m admittedly speaking from a place of privilege. While I haven’t been given exactly what I want, I’ve still been very lucky in many ways, so commenting on struggle could be seen as a little out of touch compared to real struggle.

With that said, I still believe it’s difficult to argue against the core takeaway here. That we can improve the truthfulness of our outlook by having faith in ourselves as the very nature of reality we’re intertwined with.

I hope this short piece helped you reclaim some of this faith, and maybe the fact you’re reading this is itself one of nature’s signs. One that whispers:

I’m with you, and you’re with me.

Ben Worrall