SLOWING DOWN: What Are You Avoiding?

After the initial discomfort that came with considering the answer to that question, I stopped asking myself what I should be doing and focused instead on who I was becoming.

I left my home town of Surrey, Canada with sheer will power to escape the concrete jungle, and since then I have packed up and moved my world almost 40 times, often more than once a year.

Early on, I didn’t know exactly why I left or where I wanted to go. I am deeply close with my family, but questions and curiosities pulled me in a new direction. For some reason my feet were being pushed out of the soil, and I was being called by something that was somewhere else.

I can’t tell you the number of times I got lost. In translation, in new places, in my mind. I’ve recalibrated my compass in several different directions and asked myself “what am I doing here?” countless times. The pursuit of finding ‘home’ was always my guiding light.

I tried out several different roles, lived in many cities, taken up countless hobbies, and taken many paths—ones with dead ends and some with no end in sight. Some with roadblocks, detours, and u-turns. Some dangerously toxic, some blissfully ignorant, each one winding and converging into each other.

My speed was quick. I walked quickly and ran often, always onto the next place or thing, trying new paths until it felt like one I wanted to stay on. Many times, these paths were not my own, but others’ who allowed me to join them. I am so grateful for the people who have shown me so many different ways of walking through this world.

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Eventually I stopped traveling and went back to Surrey because of the pandemic, and after sitting with the most amount of anxiety I’ve ever had, I moved into a tiny house on Vancouver Island and learned how to be alone.

I was forced to sit with the question “who are you when you’re not in motion?” And from that place another question sprung, “what are you avoiding?” I didn’t perceive myself as running from anything, and after I dredged the ocean of my memories to find the answer to that, I flipped the question to “what do you want?”

After the initial discomfort that came with considering the answer to that question, I stopped asking myself what I should be doing and focused instead on who I was becoming. I questioned my questions, and I doubted my doubts. I identified was I was avoiding, and began to feel who I am when I’m not moving somewhere or planning something. How is one supposed to sit still when the momentum of society demands us to give up all the time we have?

The most common question I received on the road was “where are you going next?” and more seldom, “where are you now?” It made me anxious when I didn’t know the answer. To stay somewhere too long felt like a waste of time. There was so much more to see and do. I was constantly in need of a new destination. I needed constant movement to occupy my mind. To distract myself from the fear that maybe I’d never find somewhere I wanted to stay. Somewhere that felt like home.

But I did so at a cost. I was speeding through life, later to learn that life was speeding past me. I was creating reels that looped different backgrounds to the same routine. As I came to this realization, I accepted that I needed a reset. I needed to allow my body to rest, my mind to slow down, and to listen for the sound of my true voice. I decided to invest my savings into myself, so I quit my job, endeavouring to see what would happen if I gave all my time to the things I desired to do without doing it for money.

At first, I wrestled with my thoughts. I woke up following an anxious voice that convinced me there was something I needed to do or somewhere I needed to be. Even without an alarm, my rise to consciousness would be interrupted by a very conditioned mechanism in my brain that would shame me for waking up too late or not being productive. When my anxiety hit a new peak, I turned to yoga to quiet my mind. I joined a 30-day yoga challenge and committed to starting each day listening to a different voice.

Eventually, I stopped thinking so much, planning, and trying. I wrote daily affirmations of the things I needed to hear, and the ways I wanted to reprogram my thinking. There is nowhere you need to be. There is nothing you need to do.

I faced my fears of boredom, missing out, and wasting time. I played in the dirt, I drank a lot of water, and I spent a lot of time in the trees. I tried new things, made art, learned about bees, and foraged for mushrooms. I picked up hitch hikers and I spent almost every day next to the ocean. The ocean always caught my tears and I started to fall in love with myself and everyone I met.

I created boundaries around the relationships that distracted me from hearing myself. I studied nutrition and started noticing how food made me feel. I stopped setting an alarm, and instead of starting my days in front of a laptop, I started by stretching. I made a point of seeing the sunset every day and I switched to decaf. I became mindful of my thoughts, and watched them race around when there was nothing that needed to be done.

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It was a pace I had never allowed my body to come down to, and at first, it felt nearly impossible. Memories I had forgotten and feelings I hadn’t processed resurfaced when I allowed my brain and body the space to breathe. Which is perhaps why I had always found a way to keep myself distracted in the first place.

I wrote on a sticky note during this period of time, “the most powerful creations come from asking the most troublesome questions.” I posted it on my wall, and I started asking myself questions I had never thought to ask. I did not want to let my grief swallow my dreams. I dreamt big, but I often doubted bigger. The highs were high and the lows were low. On a low day I wrote, “What am I doing? What do I want? What do I need?” On a better day that followed, I wrote back to myself, “give yourself a break from feeling like you need to make decisions all of the time.” Even though my habits were changing, I was still reaching for something when I sat in the stillness.

Some days, I took a break from allowing anxiety to take the wheel. I took a pause from asking the big questions and trying to process the places I had been and things I had experienced. I found, in time, that it’s on the days of rest when the real healing happens. When I let go of what I think I need to do and allow myself to take a break, slow down, and give myself compassion.

I failed, a lot. Until I replaced setting goals and making progress with setting intentions and maintaining a vision for the future. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t give up. I let go of the ‘how’s’ and I trusted that if I kept my mind on what is true, that the details would figure themselves out. The desires I recognized in my dreams were soon pouring into my waking life in the most unexpected ways. Things I thought would take years to unfold were happening instantaneously.

Every person I met felt like a meaningful coincidence, or “synchronicity” as James Redfield writes about in the book The Celestine Prophecy. The themes and questions I was focused on seemed to be getting answered, sequentially, with each new encounter. Occurrences in my life felt destined, and the more I let go of trying to figure things out, the more these mysterious encounters appeared.

Redfield writes about a transformation that happens when we become conscious of these synchronicities. At first, it surfaces as a “profound sense of restlessness” that comes to an end when we become aware of what we’re searching for. We’ll start to glimpse moments in life that feel more intense and inspiring. It felt as though there was something, or someone, operating behind the scenes of my life.

I believe that if you make space for spontaneity and uncertainty, the universe will fill that space with magic.

When you stop running so fast towards what you think you want, you’ll learn that what you truly want is naturally coming towards you—and more often than not, we are the only thing standing in the way of it.

Rumi says “Don’t look for water, be thirsty. Your thirst attracts God because your longing for God is God’s longing for you. It is the most direct way back to God because it is the magnetic attraction of the soul for the Source. Like a moth drawn to the flames, we are drawn back to God by the fire of longing. The brighter the fire, the stronger the longing. And this longing purifies you. It burns you until there is nothing left within your heart but God.”

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