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Fulfill the Promise of your Youth
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Detail of Parallel Journeys collage made in 1996. My father took the two black and white photos of me.
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Get in touch with your essence to find out what you came here to do or what will most fulfill you now that you are here. Youth, in this sense, is mostly metaphorical. It means that which is of your essence, your birthright, as compared to what is imposed upon you by circumstance.

Reclaiming the promise of your youth is a core task whether you are young, old, or in between. The promise is that which you will remember well on your deathbed, the mission implicit in your soul. When I am fulfilling my promise, I feel a depth of well-being, but when I neglect it, even for short periods, I'm consumed by anxiety. Anxiety can sometimes be helpful as the spiritual version of pain. Just as bodily pain is crucial to keep you from harming yourself, anxiety and depression are sometimes crucial in telling you that you have "departed from the experience of meaning" (the Eranos I Ching) and need to move toward the experience of meaning — toward that which is intrinsically significant. This is easier said than done, as we live in an extrinsic world that constantly demands attention, time, energy, and resources.

To ground this in practicality — is there a "big dream" you've had but are now neglecting? If the big dream is crucial to your promise, you must fulfill it. A good rule of thumb for fulfilling your big dream is that, at a minimum, any big dream needs at least two hours of focused work daily. Two-hour-plus blocks of time are hard to find. My answer is to get up early in the morning and do the high-value work before the distractions of the day set in and the low-value mechanical tasks take over. The big dream is not necessarily a creative or artistic task, it could be anything that fulfills your soul — friendship, raising children, gardening — only you know what your big dreams are.

Consider this an auspicious time to fulfill the promise of your youth.
For more on relating to the creative process see:
The Path of the Numinous…
and for dealing with the mechanical and practical obstacles to the creative path see:
Mechanical Resistance Matrix