How Trusting Your Instincts Today Will Get You Where You Want Tomorrow
We sit almost every day, pondering each little decision we have to make -- hoping, praying it will get us to that bigger goal. We let our questions and small steps define our daily lives, haunting us in our dreams. We see what we want somewhere in the distant future, too far off to even imagine ever achieving (the family, the house, the job)…and we are left feeling like hamsters on a wheel simply running in place.
These small decisions feel like they amount to nothing. How can these little decisions really play into the fulfillment of our larger dream?
Yet, we remain fixated on trying to plan out all of the small points along the way that will eventually be marked as points on a checklist to lead to the ultimate goal.
The other day, however, I was reminded that sometimes the little steps do not lead us necessarily to where we thought we would be, but if we allow them to, they lead us to something better. This moment of clarity came to me when a professor of mine said something along the lines of, “We worry about the small things, hoping to get us somewhere and yet we forget all of the steps that lead us to where we are now…”
I took this gentle comment as a reminder that even though we may have fretted over the minute decisions along the way, even though we may have spent nights up creating that "perfect" checklist to get us to our goal, and probably breaking down when one did not go the way we had planned, that somehow all of these moments have managed to amount to who we are and where we are today.
It brings me to question if, when looking back, we really could have guessed we would have achieved all the things we have today? And could we have anticipated all of the milestones we have met or the challenges we have surpassed? Could we have guessed that at the moment we freaked out about the decisions we were making that they would ultimately have led to a different, but even better place that we are in today than we envisioned?
So instead of questioning ourselves, our choices and our daunting tasks in front of us, we should learn to trust our instincts. This does not mean we shouldn't plan for the future or we shouldn't ask questions about where we want to push ourselves to be, but instead we should trust the small decisions we make today to lead us to where we are meant to be tomorrow.
We have to begin to accept that it may not happen overnight but one day we may look back realizing we are exactly where we want to be simply because we trusted our instincts to get there. It is as simple as trusting that what makes us happy today will lead to what makes us happy tomorrow.
The same professor mentioned to me once, “We don’t always realize things lead to one another, but yet here we are… and apparently they do.”
And it’s true. Not every moment is going to feel like an accomplishment that will lead to this grand end goal, but we need to remember that it will play a role in creating the path we will end up taking.
Even when things seem so unrelated and so distant from our perceived goal, they still manage to culminate to our ultimate destination.
Like little bricks placed gently one by one, ultimately our small instinctual choices will make up the road in its entirety. And while the road may be filled with bumps, haphazard curves and seemingly isolated bricks, it is nonetheless a path of connected units that lead to the destination we may not have seen at the other end.
Photo via tumblr
