You Have Everything

August 5, 2013

What would be the best advice on life you could give to a twenty-year-old?

Mine was: “don’t listen to other people’s advice”.

“That is, quite simply put, the worst advice I ever heard in my opinion” came the inevitable response, and then, a bit surprisingly, a question: “What’s the up-side of not looking for advice?”

“Doing what you want the way you want to do it” I said in response, “discovering your own, original, unique way. Making your own choices. Being responsible for your own choices. Owning your life. Owning your experience. Owning yourself.”

Still he didn’t give up.

“The whole purpose of asking for advice is to make progress, by learning from the mistakes of not only ourselves but the ones before us” he retorted, “where would we be if we didn’t ask for advice?”

Where would we be?

Where would we be if we did not follow into footsteps, if we did not turn to others to ask what life is, how to live it, who am I?

Where would we be? What would we do if there was no one to tell us how to live?

I asked those questions and as I did and an image popped into my mind, straight from some dark forgotten corner where my long gone zen past hid: a pilgrim with a sac carried over his shoulder, and in the sac everything he needs. Everything he will ever need. To be who he is. And then I knew, without any doubt I knew that I have everything I need, that I know everything I need to know, that I am everything I need to be…

to be what I am.

I do not need the support to be myself. I do not need an advice on how to be myself, in fact such advice would be impossible to give because there is no one out there who knows how to be me. No one knows what it means to be me — only I do.

No one knows what it means to be you, either. No one knows how a life that is an expression of who you are should look like. Only you do. And you do know.

You know everything you need to know, you have everything you need to have and you are everything you need to be,

to be what you are.

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