Today’s Find Your Flow message is about taking the next step when you don’t know exactly where it’s going to lead.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’m getting ready to move out of the home I’ve lived in for the past 14 years and into a house. And for a while, I think part of what made this decision harder than it needed to be was that I was asking this next step to answer questions it wasn’t actually responsible for answering.

Is this my forever home? Is this exactly where I want to be long-term? Will I love having a house? Is this where I’m supposed to raise my family?…

What comes after this?

I was trying to get clarity about the whole plan before I allowed myself to feel clear about the part of the plan that was actually in front of me.

Some questions can’t be answered from where we’re currently standing—we actually have to allow for and embrace lived experience as a means to gaining clarity.

I remember something similar happening when I lived in New York. For years, I really wanted to professionally decorate my apartment. I finally did it, and I remember looking around and feeling completely at home. It was perfect in that it was exactly what I had wanted. It met by expectations and then some.

And then, almost all of a sudden, I knew it was time to leave. 

It wasn’t because anything was wrong. It was almost the opposite. I had gotten that chapter to a place where it felt complete, and with that came this incredibly clear knowing that I was ready for something else. Leaving was still scary, but the knowing itself felt effortless.

Then I came to LA and found the place I live in now. It was just a piece of land with a sign saying building coming soon, and somehow I knew it was my next home. I obviously had no idea that I would end up living here for 14 years. I didn’t need to know that. I only needed to know that it was right for what was next.

And now, 14 years later, I’ve known for a while that I’m ready to leave, but this time the next answer didn’t arrive quite as neatly. I looked at different neighborhoods, different cities, even countries, different kinds of homes and allowed myself to explore and live into different versions of what I thought my life could look like. At times I put a lot of pressure on myself to figure out which one was the answer.

Eventually, I kept coming back to: I’ll know when I know.

And what I know now isn’t necessarily where I want to be forever. What I know is what I want to try next.

I don’t actually know how I’ll feel about having a house until I live in one. I don’t know if I’ll love this particular area until it becomes part of my everyday life. I don’t know whether this house will be home for a very long time or whether living there will give me clarity about somewhere else I want to go.

There are things we can think our way into clarity about, but there are other things we can only live our way into clarity about. 

We have to try them, experience them and give ourselves the chance to gather information we simply don’t have yet.

For a while, I think I was treating an in-between step as though it somehow wasn’t enough. If I was going to move, I wanted to know I was moving to the right place. I wanted the decision to answer all of the questions that came after it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the in-between step might be exactly what allows the next answer to become clear.

We can put so much pressure on a decision by unconsciously turning it into a lifetime commitment. Instead of asking whether something feels like the right next step, we ask whether it’s the right job, the right home, the right business, the right relationship or the right direction for the rest of our lives.

That’s a lot of responsibility to put on one decision.

Maybe we’re asking the next step to answer questions it was never responsible for answering.

The you that’s making decisions today hasn’t lived what comes next yet. You haven’t had those experiences, learned those lessons or discovered the things you’re going to discover along the way. 

You’re essentially asking today’s version of you to have tomorrow’s information.

And maybe trial and error isn’t something we need to be quite so afraid of either. Trying something and discovering if it is or isn’t what you want doesn’t necessarily mean you made the wrong choice. It may simply mean you now know something you couldn’t have known without trying it.

That’s part of how we grow. It’s part of how we get clearer.

And sometimes the chapter that looks like an in-between chapter while we’re entering it ends up being far more important than we could have imagined.

So this week, think about somewhere in your own life.

• Where are you waiting for more clarity before you move forward? 
• Are you actually unclear about the next step, or are you asking that next step to give you certainty about everything that comes after it?
• What would you choose if you only had to choose what feels right next?

The next chapter doesn’t have to be the end of the book. It was never supposed to be.

Sometimes you just need enough clarity to turn the page.

With love,

Laurin