When I was younger, the primary focus of all my desire was romantic love. I would happily turn my life upside down, and myself inside out, in pursuit of it. I couldn’t understand why it wasn’t so important to everyone else. I assumed they were missing something.
I was the one missing something – hoping endlessly that romantic love would fill the void where this missing piece should reside.
I suffered under that misguided notion for a couple of decades (I started very young). Eventually I figured out what I really needed to do, which was, essentially, learn to love myself.
And then I could soften my focus. I turned my attention to health. And then to wealth. And looking back, I can see I’ve been filling in missing pieces in order of importance, without even realising what I was doing. I was not always very effective in my endeavours, but there was something very wise at play urging me toward wholeness.
At this stage of my life, I am grateful to genuinely feel my greatest desire is to contribute. I deeply desire to be of service in the best way I can be. It’s not a sense of obligation, but a sense of inspiration, excitement, compulsion, to find the best path to enact positive change. I haven’t exactly found the path yet, and I’m not exactly healed yet, but the difference is stark from where I used to be.
It has pretty much convinced me that changing the world for the better is, first and foremost, an inside job. We all need to do our own work to fix our broken and missing pieces, before we can fully come together and do the collective work of fixing the mess all of our pains and traumas have created.
That’s a frustrating truth that many would argue with, but I set my sights high when I think about changing the world, and I can’t see a reality where we don’t create a world in our own image.
There are a whole lot of messes that need fixing right now, so we’re going to have to make do with some broken pieces in the meantime. The point is not to lose sight of the inner work amongst the outer work. Because to get the real traction that’s required to tackle our big fucking problems, we need more whole people showing up.