500 Words a Week - Nobody Has It Figured Out

With each passing year, I’ve come upon a realisation. No one has it all figured out. No one has this wonderful and confusing life we live figured out. We all struggle with something to some capacity. We are all a little lost in some aspect of our life.

This is ok. This little feeling of uncertainty or unknowing is ok. We don’t have to have everything figured out.

We go through school and perhaps then college/ university, where everything is pre-planned for us. Be at a certain place at a certain time, do this and that to get good marks in your subjects. We have a definitive system to understand whether we are doing well or not as grades and percents are handed to us.

Upon leaving and being thrown into the world, this system for measuring our progress is out the window.

I think this is an underlying aspect that takes us some time to come to grips with. Having no system for determining whether we are doing well or not. As we have nothing, we drift towards trying to figure out if we are doing well or not by comparing ourself to others. Therefore our feelings of worth are external to us. We have no control over these feelings of worth because we have placed them on the external, on achieving certain accolades others have deemed as successful or worthy. We have never taken the time to think about what it truly is we want to achieve. What are the standards with which we would like to live our life, that would bring us some form of internal contentment or sense of achievement.

This brings us back to these feelings of uncertainty and unknowing about what the future holds as described above. Maybe in having this type of conversation with ourself, when we talk about what does success mean to us, some of these feelings of uncertainty will dissipate.

I don’t think these feelings will ever fully go away. To some degree there will always be that little uncertain voice in the back of our mind. It’s then in understanding that it’s ok to not have everything figured out, do we get some comfort and allow ourself to detach from that feeling of uncertainty.

When we start talking about these feelings of uncertainty, and thinking of all the options we may have on our plate, we may feel a little overwhelmed by this and drift towards negative feelings. Uncertainty can be exciting too, we aren’t supposed to have everything in life figured out. If we did, there would be no surprises, no moments of joy and bliss we at times suddenly find ourself in.

The point of this blog was firstly for us to understand that these feelings of uncertainty we experience are normal. Secondly, we still have work to do. We have work to do in determining the standards with which we want to live our life.