It Was Meant to Be…Wasn’t It?

I was recently struck by the differences between the phrases “it was meant to be” and “everything in life has meaning.”

The phrase “it was meant to be” seems to imply that the meaning is built into the experience itself, while “everything in life has meaning” suggests that I am the one who gets to create the meaning.

What always amazes me about beliefs is how rarely we examine them. Many of them weren’t conclusions we arrived at through conscious choice. They were simply ideas we inherited, absorbed from the people around us, or accepted because everyone else seemed to.

So much of what we believe to be “truth” is really a set of unquestioned collective agreements. We inherit beliefs such as “our value comes from what we accomplish,” “being number one is somehow better than simply being enough,” “persistence is always more admirable than changing course,” or “walking away means we have failed.”

But as I come back to these two ideas — “it was meant to be” and “everything in life has meaning” — I realize that I can’t prove either of them to be true or false. So if that’s the case, I might as well choose the beliefs that help me see myself with a little more love and a lot less judgment.

For example, I have spent my entire life searching for the “perfect job, career, or business” that would highlight my natural talents and skills, provide a good income, and give me the ultimate freedom and flexibility to live wherever I wanted and have time to do all of the things I enjoy doing.

Well, that hasn’t happened. Even most recently, I was still attempting it when I went back to school to be a therapist, only to abandon the entire career six months in when I realized how misaligned it really felt for me.

But I also know that many people would probably perceive that as a failure or a sign that I lacked the ability to persist and persevere through challenges, or a “stick-to-itiveness” that somehow we have been told is an important trait to have.

And in the past I might have agreed with them. But I didn’t this time. This time the meaning was different. And I am realizing, as I seem to realize with everything, that it is because this time I asked myself different questions.

Instead of asking myself, “How could you be such an idiot? How could you waste so much time and money? Why are you such a quitter? When will you ever learn?”

I asked, “What have I learned from this experience? Why does this feel so misaligned for me? What if my value has nothing to do with my job or career? If I never found ‘the perfect job,’ would my life be a failure?”

Those were some pretty profound changes in the questions that I asked that resulted in some pretty profound changes in how I felt when making the decision to walk away from a barely started career.

Because even though I could feel the discomfort in some of the responses from the people who heard the news, I was okay with that. I didn’t feel the shame that this decision would have brought me in the past, even when I got the sense that other people felt I probably “should” feel that. And from their perspective, I should.

I just was operating from a different perspective. I had chosen to assign a different meaning.

And so whether I was “meant to be” a therapist so that I could quit the job six months after I started, so that I could have this whole reassignment of meaning I spoke about, I have no idea.

But I do know that when I ask different questions and assign different meaning, I create a different relationship with myself. One that feels a lot kinder.

Now when I think about how convinced I was that to I was supposed to be a therapist, only to realize, “Nope… not meant to be that,” I just have to laugh lovingly at myself.

So who knows, maybe I was meant to be a therapist just long enough to discover that I wasn’t…