Notes to Myself - Part VI

Why We Never Feel Ready, How Life Unfolds, and Learning to Trust

Today's part will be a bit more philosophical. Maybe that's the German in me. Or it's just a thing that came with age, since as a teenager, I would’ve never touched any of Nietzsche’s or similar books.

But now it's time to spread my little wings and jump into philosophical grounds.

Let's hope it's not gonna be a crash landing…

Image by Arina Krasnikova on Pexels

You’ll Never Feel Ready

I remember my first day at university. It was the first time I was far away from home. Everything felt so new. It scared me, and somehow I didn’t feel ready for this new chapter in my life.
Well, somehow I made it through those first days and eventually got used to my new environment.

My first job gave me the same feeling.

However, I reached completely new levels of discomfort when I was about to quit that job and travel for a year. In my head, I had made the decision weeks earlier, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to write the resignation letter.

The simple reason: I didn’t feel ready.

Of course, the deeper reason was anxiety — fear of the unknown, of letting go of my career and most of the material things I had acquired.

I guess every young bird can relate. We all have that moment when we jump out of the nest — our so-called comfort zone — for the very first time.

We check our wings again and again, waiting for the perfect wind, hoping we’ve calculated our course correctly. We’ll never feel ready, but we know there’s no way around jumping.

I thought things would get easier with time. As we get older, we get wiser and know that we need to push through our initial resistance. But somehow, it’s always like stepping under a cold shower — no matter how many times you’ve done it, you never quite feel ready. All you know is that things eventually get better. It’s a kind of trust in the deeper mechanics of life.

I’ll dive deeper into that below.

Life Unfolds As You Walk It

Sometimes I wish I had a remote control for life. Then I could just press a button and life would give me exactly what I wanted. I’d be in control — and life would follow my command.

But we all know that’s not how life works.

Still, some of us try to control things in more subtle ways. One is the desire to be prepared for everything. Another is the urge to have insurance against everything that could go wrong.

I remember a girl from one of my backpacking trips. She had packed so many things that she couldn’t carry her backpack up the hill. She was clearly overprepared — yet at that point, she didn’t dare to question whether she really needed all that stuff.

Traveling taught me to move through life with less baggage. You quickly learn that you don’t need much. Somehow, life tends to provide what you need — though sometimes you do have to ask for help.

Even if you had everything with you, life would still find a way to surprise you. It’s simply impossible to prepare for everything. In other words, life isn’t under our control, even when it sometimes seems that way.

Sure, we’ve made sure the lions don’t eat us anymore, and we have pills and vaccines for microbes and viruses that would have killed us centuries ago.

But now we have tables and doorframes. Which sounds great — until you smash your pinky toe against one of them.

In other words, there’s always something. Taking things with humor — and trusting that you’ll somehow handle the next damn problem — makes the walk through life a lot easier.

Ideas Come When You Focus and Then Let Go

The brain is a wonderful tool. Used wisely, it can help you in almost magical ways.

I’ve often noticed that my breakthroughs came right when I was about to give up — when I was exhausted and angry at myself for having wasted so much time on a project that seemed doomed to fail.

Well, that was the wrong way to think.

It often turned out that taking a step back and easing up a little did the trick. Being a bit sloppy, doing things differently, or even a little chaotically sometimes revealed the solution. Suddenly, things started working — or I got an idea that helped me finally open the treasure chest.

The funny thing is, the magic only seemed to happen after I had already poured a lot of energy and effort into the project. Maybe it just takes a period of intense focus for the brain to build the necessary connections.

Maybe it’s like physical training: you first have to build the muscles, and then things get easier. But if you train all the time, you end up overworking your muscles instead of strengthening them.

Learn to Trust

All the points above can be summed up in this one.

We often overthink our lives and make them far more complicated than they really are. Maybe we need a bit of drama to keep the show interesting. Of course, no one consciously chooses drama — but most of us struggle to simply accept life as it is.

Things get easier as we get older. It’s partly experience, and partly that we just don’t have the energy for drama anymore.

Beyond all that, one of life’s greatest lessons is learning to trust it. There will always be moments like the young bird jumping out of the nest for the first time, learning to trust its wings.

We begin by trusting our skills — that’s how we learn to master daily life. And every once in a while, life throws some shit our way. Somehow, we make it through. At some point, we realize that we’ve always made it, even when the odds were completely against us.

That’s where the real shift happens.

Some people start truly living only after facing a dark existential crisis. Maybe we need the darkness to discover the power that lies within us.

We are born into this world with everything we need for our journey on this spaceship called Earth. Why should we be any different from the animals that are perfectly built for their habitats?

Once we learn to trust that we are made for this life — and that we already have everything it takes — all the points above become so much easier to live by.

Then we can simply spread our wings and learn to fly.

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In case you missed the previous part…

Before You Go…

I am a curious person and love to interact with people. Up to this point, I did all the talking with the words written here.

Maybe you mumbled, nodded, drifted into your own memories, or showed some other kind of reaction to my words. All of them have in common that I cannot hear or see any of them.

So… here is the trick: give me a like when you want to read more like this from me (the little heart at the bottom is only one mouse click away).

Even better, share some of your thoughts with me and leave a comment. You know words can connect—when both sides want them to.

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