Imagine yourself on a ship in the middle of a vast ocean.
You don’t know where you’re going or where you are.
Are you alarmed, concerned, and fearful of being unmoored?
Or are you accepting of what is, open to the experience, with faith that what will be will be?
We’re taught to go through life with goals and a clear destination. What do you want to be when you grow up? Follow the trail blazed by those before you.
But what about the innovators, visionaries, explorers, disruptors, and the people who are blazing the trails in uncharted territories? What if their goal is more vague and general? Does that make their goal any more right or wrong?
Why are we using judgments to make things right or wrong anyways? What good does that really do? Discernment can be informational when used in a neutral way, yet judgement becomes detrimental when charged with negativity.
What if something just is?
We tend to see poop as waste, disgusting, and something we definitely don’t want to step in or smell. We might find ourselves judging poop as wrong, disgusting, or bad.
To a dung beetle, or a fertilization company, a pile of poop is a valuable treasure. It really is all a matter of perspective.
With discernment, we see poop from very different perspectives without the need for judgement.
With discernment, we can also see that an unmoored ship could be many things without the need to judge it.
For trailblazers, what if being unmoored is part of the process? It might not feel comfortable, and we can discern it as being less desirable, but entire continents have been discovered by unmoored ships.
Magic can happen when we go with the flow and allow the current to take us where it will.
What if there is no right or wrong answer, there are just answers?
What if we’re exactly where we need to be at this moment in time?
What if it’s okay that we aren’t super clear on what we want because we aren’t sure what’s possible?
Instead of clearly stating you want to win a gold metal in curling, you could say your goal is to explore ways to bring people closer together to make the world a better place. It’s a very unmoored goal, and perfect for trailblazers who can’t see what lies ahead on their journey because they haven’t uncovered it yet.
What if we don’t really need all of our goals to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely?
What if our goals can be GRAND - Ginormous, Ridiculous, Ambiguous, Naive, and Different?
What if being unmoored shows us that we can have faith, go with the flow, accept what is, release our judgments, and just be?
If that’s the lesson in it, I’m happy to be unmoored.