Finding Your Destiny

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”

Alan Turing

Have you ever felt that burning desire to fulfill your role in the world? It seems like it would be complete peace, wouldn’t it? To be able to have your passions burn and your anxieties fall to the wayside. It is with this quote that we can find our first step in the process.

When we were young, we have hopes and dreams that range as wide as the mind can imagine. In a world of magic that kids live in, we can find the beauty in the world—magic that we lose with age. When we ask an innocent child what they want to be when they grow up, they don’t tell you about the money they can make or the cars they can buy. They don’t tell you that they want to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. No, their dreams derive from something different—somewhere different.

When we are teenagers and the world is upon our doorstep, we begin to change. Confusion, the staple of our teenage years, allows us to look down different paths full of the riches of the materialized world we live in. It’s no longer what do YOU want to do, but rather what does society wants you to do? Though our destiny may not align with our childhood dreams, we forget how to check in with ourselves to find what we truly want.

There’s no doubt that some of us are lucky, and we can ignore the temptations of luxury. Yet, far too often, many of us are led astray. We walk the path that we so dearly want until one day we realize something. This isn't what we actually want.

Here’s the thing. When we walk a path that isn’t our own, there will always be a cognitive dissonance that ruffles our feathers and churns the soul. It could take months, years, and even decades to notice because we are often told that this unease is usual to adulthood. Then we come to the end of the road, and we have two choices:

1. We can continue down the path that we’ve been walking. We can work through the unease and keep chasing the next thing.
2. We can walk the path that we were meant to walk.

The reason I bring the quote above into light is that we are all equally unique individuals. Alan Turing, an eccentric man, often not accepted into the realms of society, was a perfect example of this individuality. He faced years of adversity with fulfilling his purpose in this world and many did not believe in his mathematic abilities. Alan Turing broke the unbreakable German code in World War Two, cut the war short by years, and saved millions of lives in the process. He invented the Turing Machine and set a rudimentary precedent for the modern-day computer.

From day one, there aren’t many people on our sides. We have our family and our close social circles, but not many people beyond that will think anything of you. That is why finding your destiny doesn’t come from searching in the external world. It is cultivated within, and it grows like a budding tree from your most profound depths.

Your destiny is a moving target that will never plant its foot in the ground. It grows with you, and you must be able to chase that feeling within you that is contradictory in the fact that it is ambiguously distinct. We may not be able to define it with any logic, but we know what it is.

Finding your place in this world is not easy, and it takes countless lessons and years of self-growth. It is the hardest thing we will ever have to do, but it is worth it, and you can do it. For, if you couldn’t, you would not be placed in this world.

Don’t feel like you must invent the next major breakthrough in technology or defeat hate. It's something only you can do. The universe has coalesced into a set of random yet meaningful sequence of events and you are apart of it everyday. So chase what fulfills your soul and brings a wholeness within you. The only question is now, do you have the courage to be vulnerable and go fighting in the arena of life?

“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you achieve it.”

Paulo Coelho ~ The Alchemist