But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other … along the path prescribed by your unconscious … the next and most necessary thing.*
Carl Jung

the essential thing “in heaven and earth” is … that there should be a long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living**
Frederick Nietzche

Why do you think this is the end,
That there is no new possibility?

Railing against the stories prescribed for us
is, in the end, acquiescing.

“I am not this!”
is a waste of energy when we could be exploring
and being our truest self,
doing the next thing whispered from within.

A changing of both the future and the past:

Although an initial reaction may be highly negative or debilitating, all painful experiences can be reframed, reinterpreted, and ultimately used as growing experiences.^

Then this is not the end,
It is more likely a beginning,
And you have grit as well as talent,
Enlarged through small steps:

In the long run … grit may matter more than talent.^^

Apart from the stories others provide for us,
When we faithfully do the things we must do –
Including faithfulness to ourselves –
We will find that we have travelled a great and meaningful distance:

And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been willing enough to face the uncertainty, it is our own singular path, unplotted by our anxious younger selves, untrodden by anyone else.*^

*Quoted in Maria Popova’s The Maginalian: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of “Do the Next Right Thing”;
**Quoted in Eugene Peterson’s A Long Obedience in the Same Direction;
^From Ben Hardy’s Personality Isn’t Permanent;
^^From Angela Duckworth’s Grit;
*^From Maria Popova’s The Maginalian: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of “Do the Next Right Thing”