When I woke up from my nap this evening, I had a very weird image in my head of the early men who were still trying to figure out the way things worked, you know, in order to survive and everything, and I realized that they knew nothing and worked on pure instinct, at least in the beginning. Of course, somebody decided that things should be recorded in history and the knowledge should be passed down to the future generations and now we have access to almost anything we want. The only thing is, we still don’t really have everything figured out.
And that is okay!
You know why? Remember when we were all just kids with big dreams and we thought that adults were so cool because they always had everything figured out? Well, turns out that wasn’t true. At least, not all the time. Nobody ever has everything figured out. Maybe they save things for a rainy day and they have learned from past experience to deal with certain situations that catch them off-guard, but they, too, are working on pure instinct. You could have things figured out for about a hundred steps from now but things could go wrong and plans could change! There are things that none of us can predict.
And that is okay!
I read somewhere that the only thing we need to be in our twenties is ourselves and it makes a lot of sense. This, in no way, of course, means that you shouldn’t have ambitions or that you shouldn’t work hard. But the world tells us that we need to have every little thing figured out by the time we graduate and that’s too much pressure, don’t you think? It’s a really good thing to have a plan, in general, but we don’t control life. We can’t bend things to our will sometimes because they are much bigger than us. And maybe improvising can only get us so far, but it’s a learning curve. Somewhere along the way, you become capable of handling things on your own, even when you didn’t really have it all figured out.
And that is okay!
We all stumble around, get cut, scraped and bruised, fall on our faces and butts, and a bunch of other things but eventually, we do end up making it out of the woods. Some people end up figuring things out way sooner than the rest of us, but we must understand that life is not a competition, as we were made to believe. Life is supposed to be about living and thriving, and not just surviving. We are often very harsh on ourselves because we don’t have it all figured out the way some XYZ person has. Well, there are more than just a few factors to how different your life is from XYZ’s and you don’t necessarily have to achieve everything they did by the time they were as old as you.
And that is okay!
I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard the phrase ‘I wish we had known how to go about this when we were your age,” and it just proves that even they didn’t have it all figured out. Not having things figured out isn’t an excuse for slacking off, or for expecting things to magically appear in front of you. Of course, we need to constantly put in the effort it needs and be kind to ourselves during the process. Not having things figured out doesn’t mean that you’re never going to, either. It just means that sometimes, things take their own sweet time to happen and maybe rushing them isn’t going to work.
And that is okay!
You’re still making progress as long as you’re willing to take a step forward every single day. Not all progress happens at the same time and it doesn’t happen the same way. None of us is going to figure two things out the same way because they seldom happen the same way. But, when you do end up facing a situation that you’ve previously figured a way out of, you’ll know exactly what to do. It’s one of the most confusing learning experiences ever and we’re going to have so many of those. So, it’s only natural that we don’t always have things figured out.
And that’s okay.
You’ll figure it all out along the way.
Cheerio! Xx
Featured Image by Jack Anstey on Unsplash
The Shubhster Diaries 
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