Aligned & Awake: Clarity Is a Feral Travel Companion

The confident version of me never turned up, so I left without her.

Aligned & Awake
My reflections on life through travel, human design, energy, astrology, and emotional clarity. Not as a guru. Just one person figuring it out in real time.

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“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears. Clarity doesn’t come before action. It comes from action.” — Rumi

I would love clarity to arrive first. Wouldn’t we all.

I picture her well-rested and smug, clipboard under one arm, colour-coded tabs, a pastry she’s not even going to offer me. I would like clarity to knock politely on the door and say, “Tanya, darling, here is the plan.” Here is exactly where you’re going, the precise route, the emotional forecast, and documented proof that you will not make an absolute bags of it.

Lovely. Clarity, unfortunately, appears to have other plans.

Clarity, I’m learning, is a slightly feral travel companion who only speaks once you’ve already bought the ticket. You move first. Then the path starts whispering. It’s small. A sentence you write that suddenly feels true, or a conversation that opens a door you didn’t know existed. A place that feels right in your bones before your mind has had time to build a spreadsheet about it.

The last two years of my life have had almost no clarity.

None. I have been living in a fog so thick it’s like someone handed me a pair of glasses, smeared them with butter, and said, “Off you go, best of luck.” I left a marriage, a home, a career, an entire identity I understood, and walked directly into not knowing where I’d live, what I was building, or whether any of it would work — or whether I’d look back in five years and realize I’d made a spectacular and very public mistake.

It has been, at times, genuinely terrifying.

I am not someone who finds the unknown comfortable. I like a plan. I like to know what’s coming (most of the time). The not-knowing has been the hardest part of all of it, harder than the heartbreak some days, because at least heartbreak has a shape. Fog just sits there, refusing to lift, while you squint into it, hoping to make out something solid.

For a long time, I stood still in that fog, waiting to feel ready, to feel confident, to become the version of myself who knew exactly what she was doing.

That woman never arrived. Rude, honestly.

So I started walking without her.

I wrote one thing, then another. I booked the flight. I sent the pitch. I opened the document I’d been avoiding for weeks. I followed the strange little pull in my chest, the one that kept saying “this way”, even when this way looked like a dimly lit hallway with questionable lighting.

Something started to happen though. Evidence, of all things. I learned what gave me energy by actually doing it. I learned what drained me because I stayed too long and felt my soul quietly pack a bag and leave before the meeting even ended. I learned what sounded like my voice by writing the awkward version first and letting it be terrible. I learned what I wanted because I finally stopped asking my fear for directions, which, for the record, is like asking a pigeon in a car park to plan your future.

The clarity came from contact with the work, the world, the choice in front of me. Never once from sitting still and thinking hard about it.

All that moving made me think of water.

Photo by Jon Flobrant on Unsplash

A river is powerful because it moves. It’s vibrant and alive and full of minerals, and life is drawn to it. Fish, animals, people, everything gravitates toward moving water because it’s healthy, abundant and clean. There’s a reason we’re pulled toward the sound of a rushing river. It’s alive in a way you can feel.

Stagnant water does the opposite. Still for too long and it starts to smell. It grows bacteria; nothing wants to go near it or live in it. You avoid it on instinct.

I don’t want to be stagnant water. Even in the fog, even when every cell in my body is begging for a guarantee that isn’t coming, I would rather be moving. Because movement is life, it keeps you vibrant, humming, and open to whatever wants to find you.

Stagnation is just a slow death with better excuses.

So if you’re standing in your own fog right now, squinting, waiting for the plan to arrive on a clipboard, here is the only thing I actually know for sure.

You don’t need to see the whole way. You need the next honest step. That’s it. Just one. Then another.

I would also have preferred a five-year plan delivered by a spiritually evolved project manager with excellent boundaries and a tote bag full of snacks. But the way doesn’t appear because you think hard enough about it. It appears because your feet are on the ground, your hand is on the door, the draft exists, and you’ve finally given the universe something to respond to.

The path isn’t hiding from you.

It’s waiting for the sound of your own footsteps.

So move forward. Even when scared.

Be the river.

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Tell me…

What's something you started before you felt remotely qualified?

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