I feel for you so much as you face the depressing or potentially depressing nature of 'taking inventory'. At a time of incredibly deep reflection, taking inventory isn't just about all we've achieved, all we've experienced, all the people we have in our life and all the gains etc, it can also be about the things we haven't achieved, the things we haven't experienced, all the people we don't have in our life and the losses and so on. Two sides of the same coin, the bright side and the dark side. While the dark side of becoming more conscious can feel deeply depressing, as a 55yo gal it took me decades to reach the understanding that what feels like the dark side is more of a wake up call. While we may never have experienced a soulful sense of self beyond our early years, suddenly here it is (hence the soul destroying feelings).
I was actually about 48 when I started 'coming back to life' in a soulful sense. I began to question so much around that time. Revelations that followed all the questions helped shed light on why life wasn't entirely satisfying. So many revelations, including
- There are the right questions to ask vs the wrong ones. 'What are these feelings I'm sensing within myself?' vs 'What's wrong with me?', for example
- A significant quest in life will come with a heck of a lot of questions. The greater the quest, the greater the number of questions and the quality of those questions. While the quest for discovering what we're going to eat for dinner tonight may entail a small handful of basic questions, including whether we need to go to the shop, the quest to rediscover a lost sense of self can come with an enormous amount of questions, including 'Who am I, really?' and 'Why am I suffering so much?'
- There becomes a need to return to who we naturally are. In the beginning, we wondered about so much, we questioned so much, we imagined so much, we felt so much etc. We began life as wonderful, curious, imaginative and intensely feeling. What the heck happened? That's a whole other story😁. Even 'the voice' of inspiration or intuition may have come to us naturally when we were little, 'Ask your mum if you can go to the park' or 'They don't care about how much that means to you, otherwise they'd listen'. Over time, we can come to lose that which inspires or guides us. None of any of this is gone (what's in our nature), just buried under a whole stack of stuff. Digging for gold becomes hard work but work that's well worth the effort
Just a handful of many revelations.
Btw, it can pay to not doubt how we feel and what we're feeling. It can pay to question it instead. For example, 'How am I feeling the trip to Japan?'. Does it feel like it could be hard work? Does it feel uninspiring? Does it feel like a waste of time off from work? Personally, I can't remember the last time I had a trip away of my own choosing. Actually, it was a weekend away about 9 years ago and I felt it as relaxing, truly beautiful and soulful. There will be a place, somewhere in the world that calls to you. You will have either been there before or you're yet to find it. It may feel like an exciting place and/or a place of peace. It may call for you to do nothing more than feel it. All other trips may simply feel like hard work (managing public transport time tables, having to be at a whole number of places on time and tick them all off the list of 'places to see' and so on).
