Our Common Dharma: You’re already there

One of the questions we ask ourselves when life feels uncertain is whether we are on the right path.

We wonder if we made the right choices. Whether we stayed somewhere too long or left too soon. Whether we chose the wrong career, relationship, city, or version of ourselves. We compare where we are with where we imagined we would be, and sometimes the distance feels like a canyon.

But what if the question itself is the problem?

The spiritual task isn’t figuring out whether you are on the right path. It’s recognizing that you are already on it.

What if you made a radical assumption that you are exactly where you need to be to encounter whatever your soul is most wanting to learn about being human?

I don’t mean everything happening to us is good. I certainly don’t mean suffering is divinely assigned or that injustice should be accepted because everything happens for a reason. Sometimes terrible things happen because terrible things happen.

But whatever brought us here, here is where we are. And therefore, here is where the spiritual work begins.

There’s a huge difference between believing everything happens for a reason and choosing to make meaning from anything that happens. I personally choose to believe everything happens for a reason. But whether or not that’s true, doesn’t prevent us from making good use of whatever occurs. It’s our mindset that either allows us to take advantage of hardship, or be overwhelmed by it.

Imagine waking up tomorrow morning with one assumption: There is something good available to me today. Something to notice that will benefit me. Something to learn or to experience that, in the future, I will be so glad I had come to understand.

Sometimes we get stuck because we are fighting where we are. And I know this may sound like a cliché, but nonetheless, the advice is: begin with gratitude.

Thank you for this day. Thank you for what I know. Thank you for what I don’t know yet. Thank you for what this moment is teaching me about myself.

That’s how to exercise this philosophy on a regular day-to-day basis with whatever comes along at us. That’s the passive way of drawing benefit from the natural unfolding of life.

But spiritual practices aren’t really about being passive. They are about leaning into these ideas on purpose. So if you were to take this same concept in a more proactive way, the question you would ask yourself every single day is:

What excites me?

I don’t necessarily mean what thrills you. Most of life isn’t thrilling. I mean something subtler. Preference. Curiosity. Energy. That almost imperceptible internal leaning toward one thing rather than another.

Paying attention to those slight preferences is how we attune ourselves for the big decisions and the big internal longings that we mostly brush aside because we think they might be unreasonable or fantastical or impractical.

So practice it at first with noticing the ridiculously small choices. The dishes or the laundry? Commuting to work by the highway or the back roads? The red shirt or the green shirt? Follow your gut. Especially notice it when your gut is telling you something different than your logic. Follow your gut anyway.

You may reasonably think that these types of choices have no power to inspire your spiritual awakening. You’d be wrong.

We spend enormous amounts of time thinking about what we have to do, what we’re supposed to want, what success should look like, and what respectable people supposedly choose.

Our own internal signals become trained out of use. So practice hearing them by attuning yourself to small preferences first, and soon your attention will start snowballing all on its own until it begins to notice more significant preferences, desires, even excitement.

You’ll find yourself asking questions: What work gives me energy? What people bring something alive in me? Where do I feel useful? What am I curious enough about to become bad at before becoming good at it? What possibility keeps returning to my imagination?

Now here’s where there’s something you should be made aware of. When you start doing this, the things that don’t align with your sense of desire, preference, or excitement start becoming a lot less appealing. And I don’t mean that we begin shirking our duties, because frequently the things we really want in life require chores or duties or classes. They have a signature of excitement to them even in their own mundane realities because of the direction in which they point.

I’m talking about things like your job. Your relationships. Things we’ve been doing not because we like them, but because we think we prefer them over change. There can be an unsettling component to embarking on a path of desire and preference. Not because your life won’t get better, but because it will shake things up that you might not have even noticed required a little shaking. Some things—or people, for that matter—that may even need shaking off entirely.

Everything and everyone that doesn’t resonate with that version of you will trickle away. It won’t usually happen in an emotional outburst or a dramatic exit. They will tend to disappear in a fizzle.

We can spend our entire lives believing happiness is one decision away. Once I leave this job. Once I find someone. Once I lose the weight. Once I move. Once I have enough money. Once I figure out my purpose. Then my real life will begin.

But your real life has already begun. This is it.

The path isn’t somewhere ahead of you. The path is underneath your feet. Right now. Keep going. Pay attention. Notice what you love and do more of it.

Be here. Receive what this moment has to teach you. Give thanks for what is here without pretending everything here is good. Notice what brings you alive. Move toward it. Do the difficult things that make that movement possible.

And tomorrow, do it again.

A meaningful life isn’t built through one enormous revelation. It’s built through thousands of small acts of attention.

Until one day we look around and realize that the path we spent so much time searching for is the one we’ve been walking all along.

Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church in Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.