Where the hell am I going in this life?

It's that time again for me. Questions about my life plague me.

Why am I not a veterinarian right now? It's been 6 months since I could be one.
Why haven't I applied to more jobs?
What is holding me back?
Why am I hesitating?
What the hell am I doing with my life?

In February I moved from Palmerston North to the beautiful Hawkes Bay to pick apples. The tentative plan was to pick apples while looking for a vet job. The apple picking was a job that would be very easy to walk away from, hence why I did it. It is now July and I am still working with the same seasonal job, but I've moved on to grape pruning at a vineyard. What the hell?

Recently, I started truly questioning why I haven't moved on to what I should be doing. I borrowed a book from the library entitled, "What color is you parachute" which is a guide to getting a job. One of the exercises in it looked at what my passions are in life and asked a series of questions to try to define said passions. What I came up with sort of shocked me, because the answers had nothing to do with being a veterinarian and had everything to do with deepening my understanding about my spirituality, about traveling, and about helping people understand their own spirituality.

It answered the question about why I'm still not a veterinarian. If I can't put my heart into something 100%, I'm not going to make the effort into trying to make it happen.

This morning I decided I was totally stuck on a wall, one side was attaining a vet job, the other was to completely go for deepening my spiritual understanding of myself and of the universe. This afternoon I got a call from an old friend of mine who is a recent veterinarian. She had just come back from an interview for a job that totally made her think of me. We had a long discussion on the job and on where I was with getting one. She reminded me of what she said to me a while ago, she doesn't know if this is what she wants to do for the rest of her life, but she is giving it a go because she has the training and the skills to do the job.

Wait a second, I am in the same mind-set as her. Yet, she is out there making something of herself while I am not. It has snapped me out of my funk somewhat.

Being a vet will not hamper my spiritual growth. If anything, it will enhance it because it will be a whole new challenge. It will give me the mental stimulation that I have been craving since February and it will allow me to see what I am made of.

I have always believed that following my heart is the best thing I can do, because it won't steer me wrong. I also believe that there is no such things as coincidences. The Universe is giving me the opportunity to embark on an exciting path in my life and I would like to utilize this opportunity. So I will.

My heart has been fuzzy to me lately, nothing has been crystal clear to me as it has in the past. I believe that when I finally clear away those cobwebs, the answer will be staring me in the face.

Where did I leave that broom?

How do you feel?

Life is about learning. Every challenge we face brings about growth and transformation. Without those challenges, we would sit and stagnate and not expand ourselves in this lifetime to a greater understanding of the world around us. This is what life is all about - experience. It is up to us to experience as much as we can. From experience we learn. From learning, we expand. It is all connected. Experiences are all good. Each challenge, though it may seem difficult while in the midst of it, is a positive experience. The reason why they are difficult is so that we can fully appreciate them once we are able to look back at them and be able to see what the lesson was that was presented to us. Without difficulty, we would not remember what we learned.

My most recent lesson has been one of emotions. It is a lesson that I just had a refresher course in because, even though I had the lesson before, I needed to learn it better. Thus, a new challenge was issued and I flailed around until I figured out what I needed to learn.

Emotions belong to each of us. Each emotion that we feel is ours. We are the only ones who can feel our own emotions; we are the only ones that can create our own feelings about something or someone. We own them. We are their creators and we must take responsibility for them. No one can make us feel anything we don't want to feel. This is a hard realization for most people to make, and it's something that I still struggle with even though I've just had a few lessons in it. If we own our own emotions and are responsible for them, then why do we feel as though we must be responsible for other people's emotions as well? This was my lesson.

I am not responsible for anyone's emotions but my own. I cannot make anyone feel anything; it is not something that can be forced. Thus, I cannot say that someone has made me feel a certain way. I must own my emotions. I must remember to say, "I felt ______ when this happened." and not "You made me feel ______ when you did this."

Most importantly, I must remember that whatever it is that someone else feels, whether it be towards me or towards anything else, whether it be good or bad or indifferent, - I am not responsible for it. I am also not responsible to try to make that person feel any differently. This is not my job. My job is to see to my own happiness.

It is always my choice. I choose to feel the way I feel towards a person or a thing. I own it. If I don't want to feel a certain way, I won't. Why? Because I can.