I’m currently reading the fabulous Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig and I came across a delightful word called trumspringa. It is defined as in my own words:
n. the temptation to give up one's desk job for the simple and pastoral life, wondering if your current purpose is fulfilling.
Related to this, I heard a great piece of advice: it’s not so much about the path you choose but the direction you’re going.
I had to let both of these two thoughts swirl around in my head a bit. And then I concluded that what I want is to embrace the trumspringa mindset so that I can figure out the direction I want to go.
This is because picking a path seems really hard. It’s too granular. It’s too narrow. It doesn’t leave room for experimentation and exploration. If you’re on a path, you’re busy just going down the path and doing all the things you are supposed to be doing on that path.
But a direction - that’s wider. That’s to say, this is the approximate way that I want to go and accepting whatever comes along that leads you in that direction. It may seem like madness and from the outside it might look like you are completely lost, but if you’re aiming in one direction, eventually something will land.
Maybe you’ll even get there and see that there was a path behind you that you carved out.