There Are Always Multiple Paths

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I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of A Little More Conscious!

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Happy Saturday,

I have been in a lot of environments in my life where there was only one “right way” to do something.

From school to sports to work I often found myself in a series of yes/no prescriptive scenarios.

“There is only one right answer.”

“The only way to do X is Y”.

“In order to achieve that, you must do it like this.”

It took me three decades and a lot of life experiences like moving frequently, switching careers three times, and navigating health challenges to realize that there is no single clear path from A to B.

There may be an A.5 with a pitstop. There may be an A to C and back to B. There may be an A with an immediate false start.

For example, healing from an injury often is described like this:

In my experience as a product manager, as a journalist, and as a biomechanics researcher, I often found that things I learned in one seemingly completely unrelated domain seemed to really help me solve problems in another.

Being a scientist helped me ask better questions.

Being a journalist made me curious.

And building products from scratch made me more resourceful.

The three together became extremely powerful.

But I could never have known that or lived this had I followed the prescribed path.

The people I look up to most have embraced the adventure of being taken off of the most direct path often by forces outside of themselves. They've navigated the detours. And they have actually ended up in a better place because of what they learned along the way.

There is a part of me that gets extremely frustrated when the things I am trying to do don’t happen like I immediately envision. Or even worse - when the timeline doesn't seem to match my expectations.

I have to consistently remind myself that if I'm going in the direction that feels aligned, the timeline should not be set in stone. And even if things unfold differently than I imagined at the start and there are some detours and side quests along the way but the compass is still right, that's actually ok. And often, it's better.

So right now, as I am waiting for a surgery that has turned out to be more complicated and come with a lot more unknowns than initially anticipated, I'm trying to remind myself that sometimes things take longer or are more abstract initially for a reason. Sometimes the liminal space is the best place for new ideas and opportunities to sprout. Sometimes the most uncomfortable place is the place we need to be in in order to grow the most.

Like every great memoir I have read, sometimes the dots only seem to connect coherently in hindsight.

And knowing that there are multiple paths to going wherever it is you want to go helps.

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Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this edition and it inspired you to live a little more consciously.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️