Run the Maze

With a pencil in hand and a top-level view of a maze, it’s relatively easy to work through the confining lines from start to finish. With your overhead view of the maze on paper, you can easily retrace your steps when you run into a dead end and then continue forward down a new path. You have the power of a god as you navigate your pencil’s direction. Slowly but surely you will make your way out of the maze. Life doesn’t give you the ability to look at it with a 10,000-foot view of everything. Instead of being the god figure holding the pencil, you are the pencil and its lead that is being drawn out on the maze. In order to “escape” the maze, you must run it. Life is a maze and you are the maze runner inside.

Living life inside the maze is living life with a first-person point of view. You are the one running through the paths of life. You don’t have knowledge of what will happen in the future, you have the steps you have already taken to look back to and the present moment to enjoy. Every turn may lead to a continued path or a dead end where you have to retrace your steps. Getting lost in the maze is part of life. Escaping the maze isn’t an instant process nor is it necessarily the goal. The time spent in the maze of life is time used to live your life. Every step, every path discovered, uncovered, and rediscovered is writing the story of your life.

As you traverse the maze of life you can’t be sure where every turn will take you. Nor can you be sure when you will stumble through the exit. All you can be completely sure of is exactly what you’re doing in the present moment. Each step you take through the maze is a commitment to continue living your life.

Some turns and some steps will undoubtedly lead you into dead ends. Your response to these dead ends is your response to the trials and tribulations life throws at you. Do you sit down and wallow in your misfortune or do you retrace your steps and carry on in search of a new path? When you find yourself running down a straightaway in the paths with seemingly no end in sight, what do you do? Do you keep running, filled with excitement and anticipation of what is to come? Or do you slow down and smell the roses, enjoying where you are in the present moment? Life is less about escaping the maze and more about enjoying your time in the maze. Focus on the now. Focus on the twists and turns life will give you as you walk through its path. The end to the maze will find you naturally, just keep running through it.