The house of life has more rooms than you think

Q. …I want to stop floating. I have the strong desire to change and become the woman I know is deep inside me. I feel like I’ve recently woken up to the urgent need to do something that helps me figure out the direction my life will take, one with a sense of purpose. But how do I do that, Sugar? Where do I begin?

A. …You say that you’re done floating, but I encourage you to think of it another way and trust yourself to keep floating, except differently. Instead of letting the days pull you down the same old streams that make you feel vague and full of regret—the meaningless jobs, the endless social media scrolling, the too-many hours with friends and “Friends”—let yourself float down channels that are more likely to bring you to the places you want to go. Float down the channel of your curiosity, of your creativity, of your fears, of your ambitions, of your power, of your desires, your dreams.

Take out a notebook and at the top of a blank page write the word curiosity. On the next page write creativity. On the next fears and so on, page by page, through ambitions, power, desires, dreams and other words you might wish to add and then go back and fill each of those pages with lists of your own. Write down all the things that you’re curious about, all the things you want to create, that you fear, that feel like your power and keep writing until you’ve filled up all your blank pages with everything inside of you.

Doing this is the beginning of doing things rather than lamenting that you haven’t done them. It’s where you begin to imagine how you will learn the languages you want to speak, read the books you want to read, volunteer to change the world, and pursue your passions. The regret you describe in your letter is all about inertia; about what you haven’t done, rather than what you have. Holding onto your regret will only keep you where you are, floating among the meaningless things that will eventually drown you…

A good place to start is on the page of your notebook where the word fears is written at the top. What if you allowed that page to be the map of your passage? What if you floated your way down the channel of every one of your fears as if you were enacting a ritual?

–Cheryl Strayed, Trust Yourself Wildly

Walking down the street today, I greeted my neighbor Jimmy who is there most days, tinkering with his classic VW bug. What if I got into fixing old cars, I wondered. What kind of people would I meet? What kind of things would I learn?

When I was a kid, I spent many summers, alone in my room, trying to get invited to the cool parties by sending messages on AIM. 99.9% of the time, my attempts were unsuccessful. I sat in my room for many summers, not leaving, knocking on the doors behind which I imagined the cool kids were having great times, all the while feeling lonely and excluded.

Now, I see I don’t have to keep banging on doors that don’t open. There are SO many amazing other rooms in the house of life: the room of classic car fixing, the room of farming, of dog owning, of child raising, of kite surfing, of campaigning for religious freedom…the list is nearly infinite.

What made me change my view? In a word: wandering. What Cheryl Strayed calls floating differently. I took a sabbatical a year ago, and floated towards two of my interests: clowning and eco-villages. In the subsequent year, I changed my location to Hawaii based largely on curiosity, and have been exposed to things I would not have been exposed to in my prior, more concrete-bound habitat.

A year later, my soul is more alive. I see life more expansively. I’m excited to see what new rooms lie ahead…