Sitting outside on a park bench where I like to take nature breaks, I looked up to the sky and saw a hawk circling.

Round and round he went, in increasingly larger concentric circles over something he was chasing. I watched him intently. Then without warning he changed directions, broke the circle, and started soaring across the sky, above my head and over to the left.

He resumed his circling there, scanning the area below for any possible food.

He (or she) was hungry. Maybe there were babies to feed.

The point is that it knew when to move on.

Recognizing when we as humans should move on can be a bit more complex. When to adjust, or change our course completely? Let’s look at the areas of our lives where we’ve been circling over the same sh*t, hoping for what we want to come into our circle.

We might be planning our life’s direction with such rigidity that it leaves no room for magic. Getting too caught up in an end goal can cause us to miss out on what is happening right here in front of us, right now.

Intuition speaks when we are quiet enough to listen.

Opportunities, synchronicity, serendipitous moments—these all live in the stillness, the silence, the peace, the gap between thoughts and planning our futures, the balance between stop and go.

When we are serving a life of purpose instead of a goal, there isn’t really an end destination. It’s more about the people we meet and the situations we encounter along the way. It’s about struggle and pushing ourselves to our limits, finding out what we are truly capable of.

It’s about commitment, but also flexibility, fluidity.

It changes as we change and grows as we grow.

That is how we veer off course. Every time I’ve felt that I’ve lost my way, it is because I wasn’t paying attention.

When life seems beautiful, we want to pay attention.

And life seems beautiful when you can relax and just accept what is.

The universe has its own timing for everything. One day we will look back at the moments where we thought we were missing out on something big, and we will realize that where we were guided instead was somewhere beyond our wildest imaginations. And we will realize that our planning, our goals, never really had that much factor in the equation. The universe just had something much better in store.

We won’t find out what’s in store for us if we keep circling the same area and hoping that the things we desire will step into our circle. We need to take action. Widen our circle.

Move it completely when necessary.

We need to meet the universe in the middle.

It takes courage to change direction.

This is not the same as giving up.

The hawk’s goal doesn’t change. It is still on its search to find food, he’s just circling in different areas. It learns where it needs to persist and where it needs to move on. The hawk could try to analyze from his nest which area is best to search for food, but until it actually starts moving and flying, nothing is accomplished.

Speculation doesn’t feed hawk babies…and it doesn’t feed our souls, either.

So let us feed our souls. Let us focus on what feels good and right for us in this moment. Let us adjust our scanning circle when needed and as often as needed.

Let us get swept up in the current of everything that exists in this moment and let the universe carry us to places more incredible than any we could have planned out for ourselves.

 

 

 

 

Author: Elisabeth McKinley

Editor: Renée Picard 

Image: via Joshua Earle at Unsplash