Action Reveals the Path
the road appears once we begin walking...
Happy Summer! What a joy it is to savor sunshine, warm air, and a lightness that carries far into the day. I’ve really been appreciating the beauty of what makes this season feel like the juicy sweet taste of cherries mixed with salty warm ocean water.
The recent passing of my birthday, along with a handful of major life milestones, has invited me to reflect on the past year. What an amazing whirlwind it’s been. One of the most joyous, memorable, and expansional years of my life marked by many leaps of faith.
One of the most prominent lessons that’s resonated for me in the past year has been learning to live into this phrase: less thinking, more doing.
Being a thinker has always been a natural part of who I am. Thoughtfulness is a gift, and it’s an essential part of making intentional decisions and deepening our understanding of ourselves. But I’ve also learned that not every moment asks to be analyzed…
As humans, we think constantly. In my work as a therapist, I spend much of my day helping people untangle their emotions, behaviors, and experiences so they can better understand themselves. Thinking is an incredibly powerful tool. Yet the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve realized that insight isn’t always something we think our way into.
Sometimes, it arrives because we moved.
I’ve slowly let go of the belief that I need to think everything through before acting. Instead, I’ve started trusting myself enough to take the first step and let the experience teach me what I couldn’t have known beforehand.
We can’t always think our way to clarity. We can’t reason ourselves into certainty or wait until something feels like the “right” choice before moving forward. More often than not, clarity is something we earn through action.
As someone who has spent much of my life striving for the “perfect” outcome, that realization has been empowering. I’ve learned that:
Nothing is perfect and it doesn’t need to be.
Most things are wonderful precisely because they’re imperfect.
The choices we make, more than the choices we endlessly contemplate, show us the direction we’re meant to be going.
This idea is reflected in behavioral therapy, too. Take the action first, to reap the benefit of what the action brings.
For a long time, I believed I had to think my way to the perfect answer or somehow arrive at a feeling of certainty before making a decision. Now, I try to listen to my intuition, take the next step, and trust that the experience itself will reveal what I need to know.
The insight I’m searching for doesn’t usually appear before I begin. It appears because I began.
Action creates the path. One small step after another slowly reveals what’s waiting ahead. And if you realize the path isn’t yours, you can always reroute. But the path can never reveal itself if we remain standing still, waiting for certainty that only movement can provide.
Sometimes the next right step isn’t the one we’ve thought about the most. It’s simply the one we’ve had the courage to take. Let the doing show you the way.
With love,
Elizabeth <3
One foot in front of the other <3