There are moments in life so perfectly timed that you either call them coincidence or start looking around for the hidden cameras. This is one of those stories, and I promise you, it actually happened.
About nine or ten years ago, I asked the universe to help me change something in my life. Not because my life was bad. It wasn't. From the outside, there was very little to complain about. I simply had a growing sense that I had outgrown the life I knew, and I had absolutely no idea what was supposed to come next.
For decades I had lived what I jokingly call my “monk-hood” life. I meditated, read ancient texts, studied philosophy and contemplated the nature of existence, generally spending an unreasonable amount of time thinking about things most people probably don't discuss before their first coffee. I had explored a great many spiritual practices and taken the whole business of self-realization rather seriously.
Then something began to dawn on me. The practices that had once been so helpful were beginning to reveal their own limitations. Meditation, contemplation, philosophy and prayer can be wonderful tools, but they are still tools. Pointers. Maps. They aren't the destination, and sometimes our attachment to the map can become another thing that keeps us from seeing where we actually are. I began to suspect that I had been looking for something that could not really be found in the way I imagined. So I asked the universe for help.
Apparently, it had a sense of humor.
I was walking home from my corporate job one ordinary day, thinking about what was next and wondering what on earth I was supposed to do with this growing feeling that something in my life needed to change. I don't remember exactly what I said, but the essence was simple: “Okay, universe. I don't know what comes next. You figure it out.”
I took a few more steps and looked down. There, lying on the pavement directly in front of me, was a book. I stopped. I looked at the book, then around the street, then back at the book. I stood there for a good few minutes because, honestly, the whole thing seemed ridiculous. Surely this was some sort of joke. I was half expecting someone to jump out from behind a parked car shouting, “You've been on Candid Camera!” Eventually, I picked it up. It was Eat, Pray, Love. I kid you not.
I tucked it under my arm and started walking home, considerably more slowly than before. The first thing I did when I got home was call my husband. “Honey, you're never going to believe what just happened.” I told him the story and then immediately reassured him that there was absolutely no chance I was going to read the book. After all, I only read wisdom books. Ancient texts. Philosophy. Serious things. Books written by people who had spent several thousand years thinking about consciousness. I wasn't about to be distracted by some popular book about a woman travelling around the world.
So naturally, I took it home and proceeded to look at it every day. Eventually, something made me pick it up. And that little book opened a floodgate. I suddenly remembered something about myself that I had somehow managed to forget while searching so diligently for enlightenment: I loved reading. I loved learning about everything. Not just spirituality and consciousness, but people, psychology, science, biographies, travel, adventure, history, other cultures and all the strange, beautiful and sometimes completely absurd ways human beings move through the world.
Since that day I have probably read two or three hundred books, perhaps more. I lost count somewhere along the way. I began traveling like a madwoman. I started saying yes to experiences. And, perhaps most importantly, my relationship with spirituality changed.
I began to understand that connection with something greater than what we habitually call “ourselves” doesn't necessarily require increasingly sophisticated spiritual gymnastics. Practices can quiet the mind, cultivate attention and reveal things we might otherwise miss. But eventually the practice itself can become another identity: another version of “me, the spiritual person.”
What if letting go of our attachment to the practice is itself part of the practice? What if what we are looking for isn't somewhere else at all?
The ancient traditions have been playing with this paradox for a very long time. The Upanishadic sages repeatedly turned the inquiry back toward the one who was doing the seeking. Neti neti, “not this, not this,” asks us to remove what we are not and look more closely at what remains.
This is also where the idea that “we are our own guru” becomes more interesting. It doesn't mean we don't need teachers. We do. I have learned enormously from teachers, writers, philosophers and people whose understanding was far ahead of mine. But there is a difference between learning from someone and handing them the authority to tell you what your own experience means. A teacher can point to the moon. At some point, you have to look.
Our own life becomes the laboratory. Our relationships, reactions, disappointments, ambitions, fears, successes and failures become material for inquiry. This is where self-discovery begins to become self-mastery, not the mastery of life, but a deeper understanding of the person moving through it. And eventually that awareness reaches beyond our private lives. It changes how we lead, how we create, how we make decisions and how we influence the people around us.
Whether we call it soulful leadership, conscious entrepreneurship or simply becoming more awake in the way we live, the principle is the same: the quality of what we create is deeply connected to the quality of awareness from which we create it. You don't have to run away from ordinary life to discover wisdom because ordinary life provides all the experiments you need.
That was another thing I learned at the crossroads.
We tend to think of crossroads as problems, as though we've accidentally driven into a ditch. But a crossroads isn't necessarily evidence that anything has gone wrong. Sometimes it simply means the road you've been travelling has taken you as far as it can.
I wasn't escaping a terrible existence. I was responding to an internal knowing that I had changed. Sometimes finding direction in life isn't about discovering one grand purpose waiting somewhere ahead of us; it is about becoming honest enough to recognize when the life we are living no longer fits the person we are becoming.
We don't have to wait for our lives to fall apart before giving ourselves permission to evolve. Gratitude and change can exist in the same sentence: “I am grateful for this life, and I am ready for something different.” The same is true of challenges. We get the promotion and discover responsibility. We start the business and discover that somebody actually has to run it. We fall in love and discover that intimacy requires us to confront parts of ourselves we'd happily kept in storage. We finally get what we wanted and discover that it comes with an entirely new set of problems. This is not a design flaw. This is life. The mountain comes with altitude. Freedom comes with responsibility. Success comes with pressure. Love comes with vulnerability. Growth comes with uncertainty.
The interesting question isn't whether we can eliminate the challenge. It is what the challenge is offering us. Sometimes it asks us to become stronger, wiser, more humble or more courageous. Sometimes it shows us that the thing we desperately wanted isn't actually what we need. I've learned that we don't always get what we want, but we very often get what we need. I know how irritating that sentence can sound when you're in the middle of something you absolutely do not want. But looking back, some of the experiences I resisted most strongly became the very experiences that expanded me. What I thought was an ending became a beginning. What looked like a mistake introduced me to something I would never have discovered otherwise.
So now I try to leave a little room for the possibility that life may know something I don't. That doesn't mean pretending everything that happens is wonderful. It means not rushing to label an experience good or bad before we've seen what it might become. I've also learned to pay attention to intuition. Not every impulse is intuition; fear can dress itself up as intuition and desire can put on a very convincing costume. But there is another kind of knowing. Quieter. Less theatrical. It doesn't usually make a five-page PowerPoint presentation explaining why you should do something. It simply seems to know. Perhaps intuition is one of the ways the universe communicates with us. Perhaps it is sophisticated information processing happening beneath conscious awareness. I don't need to settle that argument to benefit from it. I can simply notice what keeps appearing: a recurring feeling, a conversation that stays with me, a door that closes, another that unexpectedly opens.
A book on a pavement.
We don't necessarily need to know what every signal means. We need to become good enough at paying attention to notice that the signal is there.
And then there is the rather magnificent idea a dear friend once gave me: “The universe isn't testing you, Monika. You are testing the universe.” That changed something for me. We often imagine life as though there is some cosmic examiner sitting behind a desk with a clipboard, watching to see whether we've finally learned our lesson. But what if life isn't an examination at all? What if it is an exploration into what is possible? The question changes from “Why is this happening to me?” to “What is possible here?” That is a very different place from which to live.
And then, of course, there is enlightenment.
Ah, enlightenment, the ultimate spiritual achievement badge, the gold medal of seeking, the imaginary certificate announcing that you have finally become yourself. I know this territory particularly well because I spent years imagining that if I understood enough, meditated enough and saw through enough layers of illusion, eventually “I” would arrive at some magnificent state called enlightenment. Looking back, there is something wonderfully funny about the idea. Who, exactly, is going to become enlightened? And what happens to all that striving when the very thing we are trying to become is what we already are? There is an old Zen saying that captures something beautifully: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Whatever realization ultimately means, it doesn't exempt us from being human. Your knee will still ache. Bills will still arrive. Someone will still misunderstand you. Your computer will still freeze at precisely the moment you forgot to save your work. You will still have laundry. And if you are particularly advanced, you may still occasionally want to throw your phone into the ocean.
Perhaps enlightenment is not about creating a life in which nothing difficult happens. Perhaps it is about changing our relationship to what happens. The world doesn't necessarily need to become different for us to experience it differently. We can spend years trying to become more peaceful, complete, awakened, healed or enlightened while operating from the assumption that something is missing. But what if that assumption is wrong?
Perhaps this is also what self-mastery really asks of us. Not perfect control over our thoughts, emotions or circumstances, but enough awareness to recognize what is happening within us without immediately becoming identified with it. Mastery, in that sense, is not becoming less human. It is becoming more conscious of how we participate in our own lives. A fish swimming through the ocean searching desperately for the ocean would be a rather tragic little creature. “Has anyone seen the ocean?” Meanwhile, it is swimming in it. Sometimes I think we are not all that different. And then the mind, being the magnificent problem-solving machine that it is, immediately asks, “Okay, but how do I achieve that?” There we go again. Another book. Another retreat. Another seven-step system. Another spiritual identity.
Perhaps this is why some of the oldest wisdom traditions are so frustratingly indirect. They don't give the mind the trophy it wants. They keep pointing back to the one who is seeking. Which brings me back to that ridiculous book on the pavement.
What happened after I found it was not that I suddenly discovered some final spiritual truth. Something much more ordinary and, in retrospect, much more profound happened: I started living more fully. I began to understand that self-discovery isn't necessarily a journey toward becoming someone new. Sometimes it is the gradual recognition of what has been there all along, underneath the identities, expectations and ideas we have accumulated about who we are supposed to be. I read books that had nothing to do with enlightenment. I became fascinated with people and their stories. I traveled. I explored. I laughed more. I said yes to experiences. I allowed myself to be curious about the world rather than constantly trying to transcend it.
Spirituality became less about what I did and more about how I lived. It was in airports and conversations, relationships and disappointments, adventure and uncertainty, getting lost and finding my way again. It was in the moments when I was completely present and the moments when I was spectacularly not. Perhaps that was the real gift hidden inside that book. It reminded me to live.
And now comes the part of the story that still makes me laugh. Before I ever found Eat, Pray, Love on the pavement, it had already been one of my favorite movies. Julia Roberts' character was at a crossroads in her own life and traveled through Italy, Bali and India, learning different lessons about herself along the way. I loved the movie. I just didn't realize I was apparently being given a preview of my own itinerary. Because here I am, all these years later, having just returned from a pilgrimage in France, presently in Bali and on my way to India. I promise I did not plan it this way. Life did.
Maybe that is what I would say to anyone standing at a crossroads right now. Don't be so quick to decide that uncertainty means you are lost. Don't assume an ending is necessarily a failure, or that a challenge has arrived merely to punish you. And don't become so attached to the form in which you expect wisdom to arrive that you miss the strange little package sitting directly in front of you. It might be a teacher, a relationship, a failure, an adventure, a book, or an unexpected invitation to become someone you hadn't imagined becoming. Pay attention. Question your assumptions. Listen to that quiet knowing. Be willing to discover that the problem you think you have may not be the real problem at all. And perhaps most importantly, don't wait for life to become perfect before you start living it.
There is no grand exemption waiting at the end of the spiritual journey. Your knees will still ache, your heart will still break, your taxes will still be due, and your loved ones will occasionally drive you completely insane. You still have to chop wood, carry water and answer emails. But perhaps you don't have to carry the unnecessary story about what all of it means. Maybe, every once in a while, you get to look down and discover that the thing you needed was already lying at your feet. You just had to stop long enough to see it.
For now, I am going to enjoy myself in paradise for as long as paradise will have me. One-way ticket. Yup.
Apparently, the universe and I are still negotiating, and judging by our history, I wouldn't put money on me winning.
