Walking our personal path

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It is an easy thing to say ~ that we are walking our personal paths. And, certainly when we consider our personal path to be a spiritual one, we tend to think that what a personal path entails is totally obvious to everybody who hears the phrase...

Yet when you start thinking about it, what is your personal path? What does it include? What should be part of it? And are there things you encounter on your personal path you wish they weren’t there? What is the use of these things being there in the first place?

Our personal path is exactly that: personal. That means that, while we can talk about the personal paths of others, we can only talk in generalities as the final choices, experience and responsibility are by definition not ours...

In the most general sense one could say that the personal path we walk through life is made up of a string of experiences through which we learn. The idea being that with every experience we gain in knowledge, wisdom, and ultimately spiritual growth.
These experiences usually are not the big grandiose things we may read about in the paper ~ they are the everyday things like how we handle getting stuck in traffic ~ again. Or how we handle people yelling at us. The joy we get from a walk in the forest. All those things tell us something about ourselves. Some of these things we like, other things we may want to change in ourselves ~ and through that process we learn about live and we come to more and more accept who we are as a person.

Now, if a personal path is spiritual in nature ~ what can doing the laundry add to that? What is spiritual in doing household chores?
What it boils down to is that while walking our personal paths it is not necessarily about the things we do and when we do them ~ it is how we handle, how we react to those things... When we find ourselves getting grumpy because we need to do a sheer unending amount of household chores that keep us from doing the fun things in life ~ we may find that these chores take longer ~ that we spend more energy on them ~ than they need to. From a personal path perspective, we may want to change something like that... The same goes for getting stuck in traffic ~ if we get highly frustrated every time that happens, we may want to ask ourselves why it is bothering us so much and make changes to our schedule or our attitude (or both) accordingly...

On thing is certain though, we can only affect our own personal path.
And we shouldn’t judge others on how they are walking their paths ~ unless we have walked a mile in their moccasins...
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