Trusting What's Next

Sunday from the Porch

Note: Sundays from the Porch will likely find you (and feel) a little different moving forward. Some reflections, like this series on What’s Next, will arrive in fragments, whereas others might take more than a week to form. My writing process has changed as I’m working to reprioritize completion and perfection.

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There is an [overwhelming] part of me that is afraid of success. Or, “success” as I have always defined it. I never want to become the kind of person who avoids striving or feels they no longer need to serve or show up for their community because they have earned the privilege of stepping back from it.

There are seasons when becoming is necessary but there can also be years when survival depends on our ability to visualize, work hard, and move with a certain kind of intention. When purpose is not a luxury but a force. But, at some point, we must allow the act of becoming to give way to simply being.

A friend and I were recently discussing existential dread. Casually. The way friends often do. And, the endless search for purpose, and the ever-present pressure people feel to become something recognizable, consequential, and complete. My friend is not American and always someone I’ve thought to have seen, felt, and moved through the world differently than most but, alas, they admitted to “feeling a force inside of them;” pushing them to find their purpose, chase their goals, and achieve something more. I have felt the same force for as long as I can remember so, naturally, I empathized and affirmed my understanding with an eye-roll. “I get it.”

“How do you do it?” They asked, “How do you carve out the space to vacate for three months and not go completely crazy?”

“First of all,” I said, blinking with surprise, “I don’t. I work every day while I travel. Most of the time, weekends too. I don’t remember the last time I ‘vacationed.’ I live nomadically.”

Then I leaned in to emphasize the truth. “Secondly,” I said, “Sometimes we’re just meant to be having a good time.”

Sometimes the inner force and external pressures eclipse one another and block out one of the most fundamental truths I know: We are meant to live well. Not perfectly and not recklessly and not without responsibility but well.

It’s not only in our best interest but, I believe, it’s encoded in our divine purpose that we are meant to identify the sources of happiness, pleasure, joy, and aliveness available to us and meet them with some degree of courage. I’m talking about the expansion that comes with travel, the companionship we find in our connections, the nourishment we get from good food, the peace we gain through prayer, the pleasure in sex, the wonder in nature, and so on. I’m talking about familiar comforts, long conversations, a day with no demands, and that “Sunday on the porch” feeling—if you will. We’re meant to recognize what makes us come alive and lean into those things with gratitude and grace wherever they find us.

There is a persistent cultural belief that joy and pleasure are what is meant to find us or are granted to us after the important work is finished; after the bills are paid, after the goals are met, after the body is improved, the career is secure, the relationship is stable, the house is in order, or whenever the future finally stops threatening us. But, I’m sorry, spoiler alert, the future never stops threatening us. There will always be another invoice. There will always be some element of uncertainty, grief, and impossibility. If we wait until the conditions are perfect before allowing ourselves to experience the fruits of our labor, we may (and many will) spend our entire lives cultivating something we never allow ourselves to taste.

This is all that occupied my mind two weeks ago, lying under a canopy on the main beach in Matosinhos, trying to do right by my body and its severe melanin deficiency. There I was in the middle of what should have otherwise been a productive workday. Nothing had been solved or resolved to grant me the permission to be there. My life is less stable than it has been in more than a decade. There was a recent break-up, an ever-present (ever-darkening) cloud of financial turmoil, and the existential dread of not knowing exactly what I am doing next. I simply succumbed to the desire and mustered up the nerve to be under the sun. And still, lying there and listening to the wind lapping the parasail above me, I felt something stronger than that pressure.

I thought, I cannot believe this is my life. Then immediately, I am so grateful to be here right now. My mind snapped back to a moment five years ago when I was juggling entrepreneurship with caregiving and hardly ever getting what I needed to survive—never mind thrive. The feeling moved me to tears before I had the moment to intellectualize it and suppress it. That was all the relief I needed. I didn’t need an apology for the heartbreak, an email to confirm opportunity was out there, or any other breakthrough of any other kind. The facts of my life were fine to remain exactly as they were because, I knew, I was exactly where I needed to be.

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This is the second essay in a three-part series on What’s Next. You can access and read the first one, “Identifying What’s Next",” for free here: