Get off the Path and Create Your Own Trail

Growing up, all we really know are the rules society has created attempting to guide and keep us on a particular path. Rules to obey, directives to follow, family and religious traditions to attend. They are everywhere from well-meaning people who are basically teaching us what society says are the right and wrong ways to do things. It begins with our parents or guardians who teach us how to live in their environment and praise us when we obey their rules and follow their guidance. When school begins, the obedient rule followers are rewarded with stickers and good remarks on their report cards. If fortunate enough to have had this guided path to follow in childhood, a foundation is set early in life for a person's moral sense of right and wrong that will guide future behavior, conscience, morality, integrity, and ethics. However, there is still a crucial missing piece or a gap in our learning along the way. There are many of us who had our basic needs met of food, water, and shelter and we followed the rules as we grew up. We checked all the boxes set forth along the path laid out before us and we lived in freedom with feelings of happiness, joy, satisfaction, and appreciation. However, for some mysterious reason, the rules changed, and we were not taught why these new rules came about or how to live, think, and feel now that these amended protocols seemed to have come out of nowhere. If fortunate enough to have had a foundational path of established rules to follow while growing up, many of us also learned subjects such as math, science, art, music, and team sports. Without knowing exactly where, when, how, or why, the praise from others shifts from "Great job obeying the rules and being a good person!" to "Excellent job being number one and the best out of everyone!" Teachers, coaches, mentors, and parents begin to praise and acknowledge publicly those who are “number one” or “the best” at something. And if you are not number one, you may start feeling less than or insignificant while not understanding how to respond at all. As happened to me, feelings of confusion, jealousy, and sadness can start creeping into our lives at a young age. All of that foundational work of feeling really good about ourselves because we simply did what we were told becomes confused with new feelings of anxiety, dread, fear, guilt, and shame for not meeting this new standard of perfection. The rules of the path change for some reason, and they change fast. When, how, and why does this happen? We enter this new way of living with a lack of knowledge about what these new negative feelings are within us and what to do with them. What are we really trying to live up to now? We are never taught directly about why the rules dramatically change along our early path. We never learn why we think and feel the way we do now that simply following the previous foundational path isn’t enough anymore. Now we learn that society seems to focus on perfection versus simply following the rules. Our foundation was set with a good, moral compass, but now being number one, striving for the top, always needing more, competing to be labeled “the best” is now the new path which becomes filled with anxiety, jealousy, frustration, overwhelm, and stress. How did this happen? How can we go back to feeling those happy and joyous feelings again that we had as children? How do we tune back in to simple appreciation to allow joy and happiness to flow back into our lives no matter the circumstance or situation? The answer to this question is why this book exists.