Dreaming about your destiny is a lot easier than fulfilling your destiny. It’s like preparing for a trip; you can imagine everything you have to do, making a mental list. But getting up from bed or that chair and actually getting it all done is something else entirely.
Dreaming and distractions
For starters, you need to be motivated enough that you don’t get distracted. While you’re packing your suitcase, for example, you can decide that you need a new pair of shoes for your trip, and you can spend the next hour and a half searching online for the perfect pair. In fact, buying new shoes for a trip isn’t necessarily a good idea; what if you realized, on your trip, only a short way into a walking activity, that those new shoes are digging into the back of your heels, making your walking activity an agonizing effort?
It takes a certain amount of calm maturity to tell yourself, when you decide you need new shoes, that it’s better to take the shoes you know are comfortable for the walking you will do, and build your wardrobe around those old friends, instead of trying to impress everyone with a new pair.
Other distractions include trying to do too much with the time you have, stopping to dream some more about the trip rather than packing for the trip, deciding to do something completely unrelated, and so on.
So it’s a combination of motivation and maturity that actually gets the job done.
What is your destiny?
Do you know what you were put on earth to do? It’s a pretty tough question to answer without some divine assistance. I got mine when I was about to give a speech in San Francisco, back in the very early days of the internet becoming a commercial and social medium.
I was ready to go onto the stage, but something in my soul was deeply troubled. I had been in the tech industry for years and could see what was happening.
Technology was amazing, and I had loved it for years, but there was a dark side.
So much power falling into the wrong hands could really mess up the world, and there was an underbelly of dismissal and disregard, in the form of anonymous negative comments, games of skill that centered on killing people, and endless distractions from real life.
Instead of fulfilling their own destinies, many were finding themselves absorbed in a virtual world that separated them from normal, loving relationships. I asked, “Why am I in the middle of all this?”
The answer was clear as day. I heard it. My destiny—which I think of as my #1 job—was to bring love, comfort, and conscience into this very industry. I’ve been doing that ever since.
First, I had to learn what love really is.
I thought I knew, of course; we always do until we learn something new that helps us realize that we didn’t know it all. As we get older, if we are to fully leverage the years we have been given, we get comfortable with the fact that we really don’t know it all.
We don’t chastise ourselves when a new lesson hits us upside the head.
You can’t know your destiny listening to the hamster wheel of ideas, worries, conversations, doubts, fears, and questions spinning around in your head. The knowledge comes from those quiet times in complete solitude, when you ask God the question, then you actively listen to something outside your head—a small fan does the trick—until you get the answer.
You will know it’s the answer because 1) it won’t be something that you would have thought of yourself, and 2) it gives you immediate peace and inspiration, both at the same time. You will feel resolved.
I never stop listening until I reach this point, then I find I have all the energy I need to carry on.
You will also get help from those who love you and whom you love. My friend Marcella was 80 when I met her. She was the most calm, grace-filled, sane woman I had ever met, and she heard from God. I knew she wasn’t crazy, so I decided that I could hear too. That started a spiritual adventure that gets more wonderful and fulfilling every year.
Then there was my autistic brother, Michael, who was the full embodiment of unconditional love on earth. He was born when I was eight, and we loved each other for the rest of his life. And, of course, there was my husband, with whom I shared a 45-year-long desire to stay in love until death parted us. Physically, anyway. He’s up in heaven with Michael, Marcella, and others who were—and still are—so precious to me.
When you are open to the love already in the world, and the concept that you are, in fact, loved, your destiny will become a part of your everyday life and lead you into wonderfully enriching experiences. And you will get better and better at not being distracted from carrying it out.