The Path Made Clear: Discovering Your Life's Direction and Purpose(8)
WES MOORE
Oftentimes I would think, Oh, well, I’m just waiting on God to tell me where He wants me to go. Like, God, tell me. Tell me what it is You want me to do. And I’ve come to a very clear understanding now. It’s not that God’s not talking to me. It’s that for so long, I just haven’t been listening. I’ve been allowing so much of the noise to cloud this conversation I’m supposed to be having. I’ve been so distracted while He’s been sending messages this whole time.
THOMAS MOORE
The ultimate care of the soul is being identified with the life that wants to live through you. So at any point, your life may give a hint that you should be moving on—maybe to a different job or even a different marriage. And if you hold back on that and say, “No, that would disrupt me,” you would be deciding to say no to life. I think that’s where the soul gets wounded most. Your individuality comes from your soul. Not from your head. It comes from allowing life to live through you.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE CLOUDS
I have a lot of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
—Oprah
I have been speaking in front of people since I was three-and-a-half years old, reciting what we called “Easter pieces” for the church.
I still remember one of my first passages:
Jesus rose on Easter day
Hallelujah Hallelujah
All the Angels did proclaim
The ladies sitting in the front row would say to my grandmother, “Hattie Mae, this girl sure is a talking child.” Eventually, I was invited to speak all of James Weldon Johnson’s poetry from his book God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse in congregations all over Nashville.
From then on, no matter the size of the stage or who was watching, I had no fear of public speaking. In fact, it was in many ways where I felt most myself—another instance of the oak within the acorn.
That is, until I got the call from Harvard.
By this time, I had been speaking for over thirty years, around the world, in stadiums filled with tens of thousands of people and during television events watched by millions. But being asked to give the commencement speech for this 382-year-old Ivy League institution was a milestone. I mean, there aren’t too many girls from rural Mississippi who can say they they got to go to Harvard to talk. What an honor!
And what pressure. I felt a lot of pressure: the kind of internal angst that makes you sit down at the computer to write, take one look at the empty screen, close the computer, and say, I’ll get to this in a little bit. Then worry about it more, set a deadline to work on it again, and, when the alarm goes off, find an excuse not to do it. You know how that goes.
Usually in times of uncertainty, my mantra is, When you don’t know what to do, do nothing and the answer will come. But I was not uncertain. Every part of me wanted to give this speech.
I have also followed the guiding principle Doubt means don’t, but again, this wasn’t doubt.
This was fear.
Fear that I had nothing revelatory to teach these brilliant Harvard minds. That I had nothing to tell them that they hadn’t heard before. And this fear manifested as procrastination. Which resulted in guilt.
Months later, during a conversation with the author Steven Pressfield, I was finally able to make sense of those feelings. Steven said: “The more important an activity is to your soul’s evolution, the more resistance you will feel to it.”
He explained that no matter the dream, the shadow of resistance is inevitable. It’s like the yin and yang—you can’t have the dream without the shadow. So, the more importance I placed on the Harvard speech, the stronger the resistance.
This was a big aha for me.
And it was incredibly comforting. It meant that there was no point in blaming myself for my anxiety, because what I was experiencing was actually a spiritual law. The worries running around in my head were nothing more than the natural force of negativity at work, the shadow that lives in all of us trying to convince us of our unworthiness: You’re not good enough. What do you think you’ve got to say to the kids at Harvard? Understanding this changed everything. It was as though a cloud had lifted!
Steven’s theory was a totally new way of looking at fear: For every dream, there is automatically going to be resistance. But your sheer will and desire can be stronger than the shadow. You get to decide. You get to declare, I want this, and confront the fear head-on.
As you’ll see in the upcoming quotes and conversations, doubt, fear, and worry stem not only from the voices inside you; resistance can also come from those who love you most. They might give you myriad reasons not to pursue your dream. But remember, although often well-intentioned, even your closest allies are usually operating with their own agenda, whether they’re aware of it or not.
As for my speech, I found my groove after I realized that you don’t need to have gone to Harvard to speak to Harvard graduates. I loved my time in Cambridge, and I’m proud that I faced down those shadow beliefs.
Fear is real. We have all experienced it. And it can be a powerful roadblock. The true meaning of courage is to be afraid—and then, with your knees knocking and your heart racing, take the leap anyway.
Ready. Set. Go.
—Oprah