It’s weird how life takes you on these loops. You start out thinking you know what you want to do, or need to do, or expecting a certain outcome, or being certain you will never have an outcome you’d like, and then you forget about all of that while you Just Survive and suddenly you look back and there you are, where you never thought you’d be, or exactly where you didn’t dare to hope you’d end up, but somehow it all ties back to a moment in your past when you decided. You decided something. You took one step and it landed you a million miles away on an entirely different planet.

When I was barely 20, still married and living in the cult with More Small Children that was good for my mental health, someone gave me two books: The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet. This person knew I was enamored of all things Winnie-the-Pooh and was eagerly awaiting the book I planned to write about Poohology (which is yet forthcoming), and bought me the books as a nod of support in my effort. Being the slightly-repressed and definitely undereducated person I was at the time, I gave them a little peruse, set them aside, and then at some point I got rid of them because all of that Eastern Mysticism probably was satanic or something.

Fast-forward 20 years and I find myself held in thrall with the ideology of Taoism and digging into literature on the subject… and I had to go and buy these two books all over again. Really as it happens I’ve been writing about Taoism (or Daoism) for some time now but lacked the “conceptual framework” to describe it. The ideas of Wu Wei (force nothing) and flowing with life as it comes align well with the stoic philosophies I have been practicing (never perfecting) for some time, but with a more compassionate acceptance of human emotion and a reliance upon the Inner Voice of conscience, or Gut Feelings, or that Still, Small Voice, or Jimeny Cricket or whathaveyou.

I’ve live most of my life focused on the outcome, and only in recent years began to wonder if I’ve got it all backwards. It’s easy to talk about “The Journey” being the point of it all but when it comes down to daily choices, in the back of my mind there’s always this X+Y=Z, action = consequence equation telling me that if I pick the right option I can control the outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth and “The Journey” is supposed to be so much more that manipulating my own choices against my own will to attempt to control the outcome. What if it’s not about the outcome? What if the choice I make today was about today and not the future? What a terrifying, liberating thought.

The crazy thing is, the more I make today choices, the more my outcomes seem to fall into place. Outcomes that I’ve even forgotten about because I was busy choosing for today. It’s hard to re-groove a brain to forget about tomorrow. But I have had allowed too many tomorrows and too many yesterdays ruin too many todays and none of them have been worth it.

The stoics focused on the idea that today is the only thing we know for sure. “Memento Mori” - Remember You Will Die - was their mantra. I struggled with the morbidity of that for a long time but the last two years have firmly cemented in my brain the knowledge that none of us are guaranteed a tomorrow. Today is the only life we have. And I am learning that all the today choices I make will land me in surprising places. Life is just like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. You don’t really have any idea which adventure you’re choosing when you turn the page. You just turn it and go. You flow with life. You force nothing. You take the steps in front of you and make the choices you are presented with each day for the accomplishment of that day. The ultimate outcome is today, because in truth, tomorrow never comes.