The Road is Yours. Keep Moving.

How much of your life is still waiting for someone else’s permission?

The Fork in the Road Has Your Name on It

At some point, we have to choose. We can stand at the proverbial fork in the road, study the signs, and remember who sent us down the wrong road last time. Eventually, another afternoon passes. We are still standing there.

As a depth psychotherapist of nearly fifty years, I’ve witnessed the struggle that comes with taking responsibility for self. Blame comes easily. Someone hurt us, failed us, held us back. There may be considerable truth in this. Some injuries take years to put into words so another person can hear them and begin to help us loosen what has held us captive.

Then comes the question of what we do with the life still waiting.

The mind manufactures problems that haven’t happened. We rehearse conversations with people who aren’t in the room, investing hours and hoards of energy in balking, squawking, moaning and groaning. Sometimes we find company that relishes a good helping of shared misery. Tomorrow’s catastrophe gets more attention than this morning’s sunlight.

I think of Jesus’ teaching about tomorrow this way: each day has enough to carry on its own. Why drag tomorrow into the kitchen before we’ve finished our coffee?

Epictetus begins his Enchiridion by reminding us that some things are ours to decide, while others lie beyond our control. We acknowledge what happened, recognize its influence, and discover where a choice remains possible. We put down the phone or decline an invitation. We tell the truth without composing a defense speech.

Jung’s understanding of individuation opens onto the difficult work of becoming oneself. In my experience, the energy around us shifts as we begin. An encounter takes an unexpected turn. We hear an invitation we would once have missed. Life seems to find an opening through which to meet us.

You recognize. You move on. You are free.

When the Dream Steps into Your Day

For everyday mystics, guidance slips into ordinary life. A dream stays with us through breakfast. A stranger says something that touches the question we’ve been carrying. Intuition arrives as a bodily knowing, and a choice that seemed impossible becomes available.

Consider an imagined woman who has spent years trying to win her mother’s approval. She dreams of an old woman standing at the family gate, holding out a pair of shoes. When she wakes, she knows they are hers. Something settles in her body. She has been waiting for permission long after she became capable of leaving.

Later that morning, looking for her keys, she comes across walking shoes she bought months ago and never wore. A friend calls unexpectedly: would she like to take a walk? She feels the quiet force of the coincidence. Her feet seem to know something her mind has spent years arguing about.

The elder at the gate has authority the woman trusts. The gesture carries kindness and an expectation that she will use what she has been given.

When her mother calls that afternoon, the familiar criticism begins. Her chest tightens, then she remembers the shoes. She says she has plans and ends the conversation. Outside, the air feels different against her face. Energy spent anticipating her mother’s displeasure becomes available for listening to her friend. The old woman’s gift has crossed into waking life.

William James wrote that his experience depends on what he attends to. Attention helps shape the world we inhabit. Synchronicity can meet us there, bringing an answering event we hadn’t arranged, a moment that feels personally addressed.

Imagine, too, an older man who measures his remaining years against an admired practitioner ten years his senior. Should he work as long? One night he dreams of a crowded gaming room. Former teachers call him toward their table. A quick-eyed stranger beside the exit holds out his coat. He leaves. Outside, his wife waits beneath a flowering tree.

He wakes relieved. At breakfast, his wife mentions a place she’d like them to visit. He almost gives his usual answer about being busy, then feels the stranger's hand on his coat. “Let’s go,” he says.

As they leave town, they pass an orchard in bloom. His wife reaches for his hand. He recognizes the flowering trees, and warmth moves through him. Dream and waking world have touched.

Hermes, traveler between worlds, seems to have accompanied them out of town. The wonder of life bypasses professional and personal rigidities and challenges. His work still matters, and he can follow its living rhythm. Today he has been given this time with his wife.

Freedom Doesn’t Need the Last Word

Moving on can feel surprisingly undramatic. The person who irritated us still irritates us. An institution continues doing what it has always done. Somewhere, people are conducting the argument we finally stopped joining.

We needn’t change them before we live.

Laozi’s Tao Te Ching places the beginning of the long journey in a single step. There is mercy in that scale. We can take the step available this morning without demanding a map of our remaining years.

An old wound may ache again. A dream may bring back someone we thought we had finished with. Recognition deepens through these returns; our response can change. Feeling the old pull no longer requires following it.

And sometimes the energy shifts before the circumstances do. We stop rehearsing the grievance. Our shoulders drop. Someone close to us feels the difference and comes nearer. A conversation becomes possible. The change has entered the world between us.

This is everyday magic as I’ve come to appreciate it: the mysterious traffic between inner recognition and outer life. We participate through the choices we make, while remaining open to what arrives of its own accord.

There is freedom in appreciating the life we have made, the person beside us at breakfast, work that still draws something living from us. Our own later years can unfold at their own pace. Another person’s longevity offers encouragement; we feel for the path opening under our feet.

And Hermes, loitering at the crossroads with somebody’s missing hat, might offer a little crazy wisdom: You don’t have to win every game. Some games are best left to those who insist on playing them.

The road is yours. Keep moving.