Every Journey Starts with a Single Step

? “Traveler, there is no path.

The path is made by walking.

By walking you make a path.”1

When we cross a bridge, we go from one place to another and perhaps, if the view is arresting, we pause to look over the landscape on either side before we continue onwards. Expediency or harsh weather can make us keep our head down and just do the walk to the other side not heeding what is extraneous to arriving at the destination we have in mind as quickly as? possible????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

As a metaphor, we cross many bridges in a lifetime. Some are about what we need to do because we have commitments because we have goals, because we have responsibilities. After all, we have others to consider in our lives, because, because……… ?And it can provide a good life, a full life, a happy life, and often a complex one.

However, at some point, for many, something else calls us, to linger, to wonder, to want to reshuffle, and to be present in a different way.? Perhaps the world throws us a curve ball - Covid for example, where we are forced to shift the way we are in the world, or our health changes, or our career shifts or ends, or we reach an age where we know that it is time to reimagine and reconfigure the shape of our life. We want the music and tempo to change. And these yearnings or changes are all full of unknowns that are both unnerving and exciting simultaneously. We feel that we might need a new passport to this new – and perhaps - foreign country which is beckoning us. The bridge of later life now becomes a place to cross it differently, to re-assess and re-assign priorities, to travel lighter, and to allow ourselves to become pilgrims in our own lives.

Later life offers us a dynamic ongoing inquiry. How do you want the remaining decades to be? What else? What other ways to live and contribute? Enjoy? Be vital? The old structures don’t feel so right anymore. What are you done with? A voice, maybe one we have not heard for a long time or wanted to heed…whispers start writing, start traveling, slow down, grab the new, let go, to let come…live differently, wear the bloody purple jogging tutu, why the hell not? Don’t sweat the small stuff, open your heart, arms, and soul to something else…..

As David Whyte, the poet and philosopher writes:

“The understanding that underlies all of our great contemplative traditions is that part of us has already arrived at the place we wish to go and holds what we want to find at the end of our journey. The journey carries not only an outward form but also, an inward symmetry to all of our outward travel; as we travel toward our goal in the outer world there is an accompanying invitation to drop down into our experience, our body, our memory, our deeper understandings – a dropping through what often feels like layers of resistance.”1

‘Bridging the Unknown from Role Work to Soul Calling’ from PattersonPrenticeDesigns will begin its next journey in January 2025. Is it time to join the company group of curious, open, deep, and generous folks to explore some of these questions, to dip deeper into your own journey? Over the course of nine months together we explore for ourselves and together with others what the next stages in our life and work might mean, look, and feel like – defying the strait jacket of taboos and convention. Your soul will thank you.

For more information, please follow the link for our full at ?https://bit.ly/40L8T4s

We look forward to hearing from you….

?

References

1. ?Antonio Machado,?Border of a Dream: Selected Poems at https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/34610.Antonio_Machado

2. From ‘The Road to Santiago ‘by David Whyte a 3-part Sunday series of talks July 2024