Trying To Make Sense Of Your Life Is What’s Actually Holding You Back

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You should try to make sense of your feelings. You should trace the lines of your thinking, find the genesis of your innermost beliefs and make sure they’re really yours. You should make lists of the things you do and don’t value, you should ask yourself what you most feel you are lacking, then look at how little you’re giving them.

But you should stop trying to make sense of your life. Doing so is trying to make sense of the trajectory, as though it’s something that controls you, not the opposite way around. Doing so is applying the life you have to the person you were.

Using logic and being mindful are not the same thing as “trying to make sense.” The former is methodical, it uses a grounded awareness to enact your true desires, the latter is looking at the product of those actions and wondering how they got that way.

There are questions to which answers may not exist. There are answers that just create more questions, solutions that can only be made from having lived something out, saw it through, tried.

The best things will not make sense, not initially, at least.

Love is not logical. Grace and joy and beauty rarely are, either. That doesn’t mean you cannot use logic to work with them, just that to fully see them, you need to use a different point of understanding.

All things in their purest state are confusingly, singularly standing. They are magical because they are mysterious. They have unknown origins and palpable endings and there is nothing to do but to live them and to see.

People who waste their lives search for reasons to love rather than ways to. They try to create avenues through which they can justify their happiness, rather than just letting themselves feel it for anything. They try to wield misguided logic to hold back from their happiness, rather than facilitate it.

There will be things you understand immediately, effects for which the causes are entirely, consciously yours. There will be things that happen in your life that you know you’ve chosen, and then others that seem to be the opposite of what you’d want. Those things are just as important, if not more so.

There are things that have reasons that will reveal themselves to you immediately. There are things that you won’t understand for years and years to come. There are things you’ll look back on and say: “I never understood why that was.”

And yet that will not make it any less so.

Sometimes the point is to experience not-knowing, and confusion. What is born of your uncertainty is sometimes more important than not having been certain in the first place.

You may never know whether or not you’re ‘meant’ to be in the city you live in, but you will live there anyway, because you have chosen to. You won’t know whether or not you’re meant to be with someone until you try to be. You will keep seeking comfort in the things that hurt you because you’ve yet to step into the discomfort of something new. Something better. Something unknown and foreign and not aligned with what you once thought you wanted.

That does not make it wrong, or bad, it just means you didn’t anticipate it. You didn’t know well enough to have chosen it.

Trying to make sense of your life is trying to see if the old story checks out, if the person you once were would be happy with the life they lead today. You’re looking for answers in people that don’t exist.

Clarity comes from doing, not thinking about doing.

A good life comes from choosing to work with what you have, accepting that you don’t always choose what you work with; but you’re always given what you need to use, especially when you don’t realize you need to use it.