Last night I got the phone call that my dad's health had turned worse and he might not make it through the night. He lives 1200 miles away - no matter what I did, I was not going to get there fast enough.  So I did the only thing I could do, which was to sit and wait, and cry, and reflect.  My mother also died unexpectedly just 2 years ago, and so I've done a lot of reflecting on life and its meaning lately. 

We're all given expectations of some sort - we are raised with our parents placing expectations on us - sometimes good, sometimes bad. I believe in the self-fulfilling prophecy... what you hear someone say to/about you repeatedly, you tend to start to believe. You may have been expected to graduate from college, or to follow in a family business. Maybe there were religious or political expectations.  Our parents teach us right and wrong - their ideas and opinions become ours.  

When my mom died I found out a plethora of family secrets, and they turned upside-down my almost-50 years of  life beliefs. At first, it was devastating, finding out that things I believed were fact were, instead, a facade. But then that became complete freedom.  Once I realized that the things I had been taught, all the things that shaped and formed my path through life, had only been someone's random expectations placed on me, I realized I had just been given the gift of total and complete liberation. I could dismiss it all, and start over, and decide for myself what was right, wrong, good, bad, helpful, hindering, etc. I actually got the gift of stepping back and starting over, shaking up all my beliefs, and starting from scratch determining who I am and what I stand for. 

Following a path set before you can be helpful if you need a guide, and if you respect the creation and destination of that path. But if a path seems ambiguous or obscure, laid by someone else for their own direction, why do we think we need to follow it dutifully? Is it scary to start clearing your own path? Yes, a bit, because you don't know what might happen along the way. Unknown things make us fearful at times, but that's also where the adventure lies. And we don't have to go down our new path in defense mode; we are creating the path. When things happen, instead of just reacting and being defensive, we have the right and the ability to take that incident and make it what we want it to be. Whether we use it to our advantage, we learn from it, we grow a bit stronger because of it, we learn to forgive because of it, we encounter new people and places, or we just prove to ourselves that we can step over it and keep going, it becomes part of the path that is now behind us. And we keep clearing the path ahead of us, making our own decisions and choosing our own direction. 

If you could start right now, this moment, and discard all the beliefs you've adopted because someone else told you to, or dump them all into a funnel and filter out only the ones you really decide you want to keep, what would those be? If you could take the expectations placed on you by others, and do the same, only retaining the ones that you actually want for yourself for your own reasons, what would those be?  You may find that you actually keep some, or that the path you're on is so deeply dug that forging a new direction is going to take a lot of digging and a lot of effort.  It's up to you to decide if it's worth it to you, but I would encourage you to look at what your path may look like once you do that digging and you are walking on your newly cleared path. Being the real you, and deciding who you are and what you are about, is a truly freeing experience. Figuring it all out may be a challenge, but it's worth the discomfort and the effort when you find yourself happily skipping on a path you created for yourself. And every day, keep looking at your path and re-assessing which direction you want it to take. If something's not working, step back, shake it up, filter it out, and start clearing the path in a new direction.  You get to decide.