Patience, Trust, and the Art of Staying On Your Path
One foot in, one foot out. That’s how I’ve been in my career for years. I was insecure, emotionally and financially, which made it difficult to convince myself to keep going. I wanted to use money to prove the value of the work that I was doing and I couldn’t because I wasn’t making money. Consequently, I was impatient and I kept preparing myself to walk away even though I didn’t want to. I always had an uneasy feeling that I be forced to give it up at some point unless I could make it financially valuable to the people around me.
“Always remember you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.”
— A.A. Milne
Spirituality talks frequently about trusting the Universe, trusting ourselves, and trusting the journey. How do you do that? How do you learn to trust an outcome you aren’t sure of? How do you learn to trust yourself?
If my tarot cards could talk to you, they would tell you that I didn’t trust anything. I questioned them, I questioned myself, I questioned my life choices. I fought with, argued with, and debated everything they told me. Every time I came back to the same place—needing to decide whether to keep going or walk away—there was a fight. There were so many frustrating moments throughout the journey when I didn’t know whether I was going to be able to continue or not. But every time I made the same choice to keep going, I learned to trust myself and the journey a little bit more.
A.A. Milne has a point. We are stronger, braver, and smarter than we think we are. Sometimes, though, people victimize themselves with this idea by suggesting they shouldn’t have had to be strong in the first place. I understand this because there have been points in my journey where I looked around and wondered why I was the only one who had to do it this way. I had a bit of “why me?” going on too.
What I learned is that it’s not “why me?”—it’s “why not me?” Spirituality teaches that we’re here for a reason—to explore, learn, grow, expand, and remember who we are as spirits. If that’s true, then the purpose of strength, bravery, and intelligence isn’t just to endure pain—it’s to give us the tools we need to do the work of growing, exploring, learning, and expanding. I couldn’t do this work without my strength and bravery. I’m not a victim of that experience because I learned to use it in a way that was helpful to me. It gave me the power to write and share the way I do now.
I remember when I first started writing, I was terrified to “splash my problems all over the Internet.” I didn’t understand the value in what I was doing. My vision of myself as a writer was still foggy. I had no idea where I was going or where I would end up. I didn’t have a clear topic like I do now—I was simply writing about my lived experience. Looking back, I’m glad I didn’t know I’d be writing this because it would have scared me, and I never would have written another word.
This is why trust in the journey is so important. When we trust the journey, we learn how to put one foot in front of the other. We start to trust that experience will give us the tools we need to take the next step. With every step forward, trust grows. And if you pay attention, you start to see that the Universe isn’t out to get you—it’s offering you experience and asking you to see it in a way that doesn’t cause pain or make you give up.
Constructs like existentialism allow us to create our own meaning from experience. If experience doesn’t have an inherent meaning of its own, then I get to decide on a meaning that serves me. A long time ago, I chose to use my lived experience as a tool to heal myself. Experience is deeply reflective for me, especially when it hurts my feelings. In those moments, I have the opportunity to question: Why did this hurt me? What’s the story I’m telling myself about this experience that’s causing pain?
Do you feel pain when you don’t get the outcome you want? Do you want to give up when things don’t work out the way you think they should? If so, why do you tell that story? Why do you believe that story to be true?
Trusting in ourselves and the Universe isn’t about getting the outcome we want every single time. It’s about trusting that even perceived failures offer valuable information. We will never learn as much from success as we do from failure. That’s part of human nature. We don’t question what isn’t broken—if something works or succeeds, we just run with it. We don’t dare jinx it by questioning success. Failure offers us an opportunity to reflect, find the hidden diamond in the rough, and take that with us into our next experience.
More trust is gained in failure than in success—as long as you don’t sabotage it by telling yourself a story that isn’t true. In spirituality, we sometimes frame failure as redirection when it’s not. I believe this is a form of self-defense. We’re protecting ourselves from the pain of failure. But failure isn’t something to avoid—it’s something to embrace. It teaches us. It shapes us. It provides tools and experience we wouldn’t get otherwise.
As we move through different experiences and begin to trust both ourselves and the journey, we develop patience. But patience can be challenging in a culture of instant gratification. We want everything immediately. Yet the Universe isn’t denying us what we want—it’s fine-tuning us through experience, making sure we’re truly ready to receive and handle what we want.
"All things happen in their own time. Everything has its season, and there is a divine order to the unfolding of every moment." — A Course in Miracles
Patience offers innate wisdom around timing, readiness, and desire. We come into this world to explore a given theme—mine was insecurity. From there, we choose our path through life while being offered experiences that reflect this theme back to us. Typically, the foundation of this theme is built during childhood through our parents or caregivers. There is a high likelihood that whatever pain was passed on to you from your parents or caregivers was the theme you were meant to explore in your life. I did get my insecurity from my mother.
To be a writer, there were aspects of my insecurity that I had to heal before I would allow myself to do what I’m doing. It’s not easy to come out in today’s world and start questioning societal norms. That’s a complicated minefield to navigate in a world filled with multiple versions of reality and subjective truths. I needed to be in a place with my insecurity where I could handle that effectively; otherwise, I never would have done it. Timing matters.
Are you ready for what you want? You think you are because your vision of your goal is in your comfort zone. The vision that your soul and the Universe have for your goal is far outside of your comfort zone. When I started writing, I wrote things that were within my comfort zone. Consistently, I was challenged to write, share, and say things that were far outside of what I was comfortable with. I was continually being expanded to share more and more ideas that seemed uncomfortable to me.
Beyond sharing my personal life and problems, the philosophical constructs offered more of a challenge. At first, because I wasn’t aware of the thinkers who had come before me, I thought people were going to think I was nuts. I saw my own views as very extreme until I found others who saw things the same way I did and realized those constructs had names. I didn’t learn these things in books. I came to them organically through my own questioning. It wasn’t until I started questioning AI about them that I realized my theories had names. Readiness matters.
Always having one foot in and one foot out meant my desire to be a writer came and went just as often. I wasn’t stable in my desire to write, and it was reflected in how I handled my writing. I would avoid it, procrastinate, quit and start again, jump around on different platforms, or create unrealistic expectations of what needed to happen in order for me to keep going. The Universe asked me for stable desire. I had to want to be a writer even if I was only talking to myself. I had to find value outside of the perception of external success, and that was hard.
Spirituality likes to squash ego desire as being a problem. We’re meant to come in and give up worldly desires by transcending our egos and minds. To be truly spiritual, we can’t have human desire—but I don’t believe that to be true. I accept human nature and the human reality we live within. Human desire, when handled consciously, can be a valuable tool to pull ourselves forward on our paths. Desire manifests as motivation. Motivation helps us create a connection with the goal we have.
The overall outcome is your ultimate motivation. The day-to-day experience probably won’t be that motivating—chances are it’ll be challenging a lot of the time. But if you stay motivated using the end goal, it can help pull you through those difficult moments. The end goal becomes the reason for the journey, and that’s what keeps you going. Desire matters.
In the end, patience and trust are what keep you on the path. They give you the tools to manage the struggle that you’ll inevitably face along the way. Human life comes with struggle; it’s not meant to be any other way. We’re here to learn how to work through those struggles. Believe me, if we could learn without the struggle, we would—but we don’t. Why not? Because we don’t want to jinx the good stuff when it happens.
Trust the struggle to teach you what you need to learn about yourself. Heal those wounds, and change how you think about the experience and how you respond to it. If you do that enough times, and you go with the flow for long enough, eventually you’ll wake up in the life you had envisioned in your heart all along.
Love to all.
Della
