You Don't Need to Know Where You're Going

Hello Seekers,

If you’ve been following The Seeker for a bit, you know I write often about living life wide open to wonder—and learning to live with the Big Questions. I also write about how we can connect with our deepest selves, and maybe with something sacred, too.

If you’re like me, you accept that you have an imperfect life. You also know that this is really the only true way to live. We make hard choices, take wrong turns, lose people, and what do we do? We just keep moving forward, trying to learn as much as we can as we go. Often, we have no idea where life will take us.

That’s why I started teaching a practice called Writing the Heart.

I’ve been running this class on Zoom and in person for a while, and honestly, it’s one of my favorite—and meaningful—things I do. Watching what happens when people actually sit down and try to write honestly about their lives has been amazing. Over the last year, one student wrote a whole 80,000-word memoir. Others have just used the class to check in with themselves, and a bunch of folks went from being curious about writing to finally calling themselves writers.

Starting today, I’m bringing a video version of Writing the Heart right here to The Seeker.

Last week, I shared a free preview so you could see how it works. Moving forward, these videos will come out twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, for paid subscribers. If you liked the preview, I’d love for you to join us.

For today’s practice, I picked a passage from the very end of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild.

If you’ve read the book, you might remember how it ends. She’s finished walking the Pacific Crest Trail, and she’s looking back at the person she was when she began the long, grueling hike: the grief over her mother’s death, the heroin habit, the sex, the self-betrayal, the end of her marriage, and all the choices she made that felt at the time like they were going to destroy her.

She arrives at a big realization, and her description of this epiphany is so moving. She stops trying to divide her life into things that should have happened and things that shouldn’t have. Standing there at the end of the trail, she sees something about herself—and maybe about life itself—that she couldn’t possibly have seen while she was right in the middle of living it: her inner dark parts, and the past decisions that felt too terrible to share with anyone, belonged to the journey, too.

None of us can.

We want a guarantee. We want to know the future. We want to know if a relationship will last. We want to know if a huge loss will break us. We want to know if we are on the right road. We want assurance that whatever is happening now will eventually make sense.

But, of course, we almost never get any of this while we’re living these hard experiences. And this: sometimes the wrong turn that we took when we were strugglig turned out to be the exact thing we needed., Maybe that wrong turn even took us where we needed to go.

In the video below, I read this passage aloud and share three prompts to get you going. No need to be a “writer.” Just grab a notebook, choose one of the cues, and see what happens.

The video and prompts are right below for paid subscribers.

Thanks for being here,

Brad