Like, what would you do if you could do anything? If you could just step outside right now and do absolutely anything? What would it be?

An astronaut? Seriously? A research biologist? Okay, I don’t actually know who you are and maybe those things are your honest answers. I can tell you, it would be a lot to do those today.

Personally, it depends on the day for me.

Today, in fact, I am writing a blog post because I feel like doing this beyond doing my actual work, which is transcribing some lectures on a rare piece of Indian philosophy which I find so endlessly interesting on most days. But today’s been quite a day, so not right now. Other days I want to be an Instagram vlogger and wear sneakers and pay $15 for a matcha.

Some days, it’s more like light a cigarette, smash a window and drive recklessly until the whole city is on fire. Kiss a man on the lips. Stand in the kitchen and spark up a giant spliff right in front of my mom.

Some days, I want to write a song, and play it on a synthesizer and turn it up until my hair lights on fire and the local power grid experiences blackouts.

On other days. I just want to roll around butt naked in a pond and lay in the grass. Soak up some sun. Maybe flirt with the nearby girls. Probably get rejected. Maybe just smoke a hand rolled cigarette all to myself in the reeds.

Other times, I wake up and immediately want to get to business. It’s all world news, geopolitics. Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to fix the entire planet. Look out, because here he comes: the next world leader, up from the shadows. You haven’t heard of him, but he’s got it all handled.

One time, I was a pathetic, sobbing mess melting into a puddle in the corner of my kitchen in a shared apartment next to the pots and pans and nobody was home. Okay, that’s actually happened multiple times. It happens all the time actually, my living situ is just different. Just me and the overfull trashcan, hanging out at eye-level. Today it was on a gorgeous hilltop with my dear parents. Things have improved.

So, if you could do absolutely anything with your life, right now, what would it be? Nevermind the ten year plan. There’s nothing wrong with making a ten year plan. Or having a long-term vision. Good luck with that. But right now, I’m talking about the right now plan. You can do anything you want with this moment. What’ll it be? Maybe a nice warm latte on the couch or up in a tree and dreaming about a vision for the future is the thing! (Never be afraid to climb a tree a drink a latte.)

Remember, there’s no wrong answer! Maybe, someday, you wanna be the first person to achieve levitation. But today, you’d love to just strum on a ukulele in a field of flowers. Maybe you think you’d like to go out and make a career of financial analysis but today you really just need to be held as you sob and grieve something big that happened six months ago. Call a friend. Maybe your mom called and you get that nagging feeling that you really should just call her back. Do it! Don’t ignore those little nudges! If you start dialing and it doesn’t feel right, just pause. Maybe you just needed to do something with your phone…

The issue here for most people, I think, is that they don’t feel loved enough to go out and pursue their passion, their excitement, whatever that might look like. There’s a fear there. If I don’t do this thing… everything in my life might collapse. Fear is always the thief of love.

So, for what it’s worth, here’s your permission slip. Go and feel loved enough to follow your excitement.

It’s not much coming from a random blog online, I know.

Remember, this excitement, this passion, this heart-sense, isn’t going to lead you in the direction you’d choose with your brain. In fact, it’ll often contradict what you “think” is the ‘right’ or ‘rational’ decision. But I can tell you, from experience, to trust it. In fact, put your entire life on it. Because it’s gong to lead you straight into the people, situations, and events needed for you to achieve your highest purpose: the most actualized expression your life is capable of taking on. And you don’t know what that is until you get there. You DON’T KNOW. I don’t care how much you’ve done astrology, personality tests, or whatever. You DON’T ACTUALLY KNOW how that purpose wants to play out!! Life is way, way to big for an astrological readout to tell you jack diddly squat about it. Read that again.

The moment you decide to follow it, you take the first step on the journey back to the center. It doesn’t follow your logic and it certainly won’t always be pretty, or be a straight line. But I can tell you from experience, it’s the line you need to take.

Heart, not head.

I’d put my entire life on it, in fact, I have. The situations you will encounter may be quite distasteful to you, perhaps painful, but you can always trust that, as long as your heart is truly allowed to lead the way, it’s the best possible scenario given where you are. If you believe in karma, then you can imagine the heart as a master teacher leading you over a karmic precipice and picking the nicest route it possibly could with the least amount of suffering possible. Sometimes there’s no good way, so it leads you straight into it in the most direct way possible, so you can confront the issue in the most epic and direct way possible. Not always fun or pretty. And sometimes you will wimp out, to your detriment, I might add. But as long as you keep chipping away at it, the path will always rise to meet you because there are no wrong directions, only shorter and longer cuts. (Well, some cuts might be so long they’re best avoided). But go easy on yourself. You don’t always (never) know which path is which (your heart does) and sometimes your biggest pitfalls secretly lead to your biggest breakthroughs (the ones you want, not the ones you thought you needed).

And, here’s something else to remember: you are getting not just where you need, but also, eventually where you really, really want to go.

The heart isn’t leading you into some boring ideal of a rosy future. It’s leading you to the present moment that is not only the most graceful, but the coolest. The one that’s so cool you couldn’t even dream of it, but maybe you sensed that it was there. If, deep down, you like a twinge of existential melancholy, it’ll be there. If you like an aesthetic, trust me, it’ll do you one better. And it’ll be right.

But, to get there, so often, we have to pay our dues. And if we let our heart guide us, we’ll pay exactly the ones we need to get where it’s taking us, which is always better than our wildest imaginations.

This isn’t because of some kind of score-keeping deity we have to appease. It’s for one simple reason: that we have to be right for the moment too. Otherwise we won’t be able to fully inhabit this mythological space properly. And there can be no faking it. Otherwise it just won’t land.

In the Bible, it says that the heart is deceitful above all things, and horribly wicked. But I want to remind anyone reading that in ancient Rome, their idea of physiology did not include the brain. They couldn’t distinguish or decipher between the brain and the heart, so it was all lumped together. Or, maybe someone was just really bitter when they wrote that. Maybe they’d lost a lover recently.

Anyway. In closing, remember that life is exciting. Even if it is a tragedy, the underlying energy is excitement *not* despondence, moping, or skulking. Those things will get you *nowhere* I repeat N.O.W.H.E.R.E. Feeling sadness is fine. Feeling sorry for yourself for feeling sadness is just emotional masturbation.

Sadness and grief are there to OPEN your heart up even more to UNCONDITIONAL LOVE. So if your process with your grief isn’t ultimately doing that, you’re doing it wrong! Yes. You are grieving wrong because grief is a divine gift. All energy is a gift from heaven FOR you, for your benefit, use it as fully and effectively as you can. Drink the divine cup thoroughly before you get stuck in the desert! Because the only thing worse than grief? An inner desert. Let the floodwaters bring it all up to the surface and take it all out to the sea, you beautiful seabird. Eating fish. Flapping those feathers in the salty air. You happy little thing. Zoom, splash, dive. You’re divine and you’re about to make the biggest break imaginable: the one into just being yourself. Fearless.

Love… oh. Too much to say about it. Too little time.

Peace

P.S. Remember: you are the living myth.

Love you, beautiful messy scrumptious delight of a being just like all the other ones who are just as unique as you are and also struggling, probably behind closed doors with some inner or outer demon you have no idea about… there we are.