The Navajo Way

In my previous post I talked about the long and winding road and how that road should always be continuing. Life is a journey, not a destination. Some times that road will be winding and challenging, some times it will be straight and narrow. But it becomes the most difficult when the road splits off into a number of different directions and you have to choose which path to follow. The most common term for this is a fork in the road.

Many times, this causes us to take pause and contemplate which way to go. Sometimes that pause turns into being stuck with fear, leading to a failure to continue. Before you begin traveling again, you want some assurances that you are taking the best route. That could be in the form of a map, a road sign, advice from someone who has taken the journey before, or what your own senses are signaling to you.

My experience tells me that those assurances provide no guarantees. A map can be wrong or outdated. Paths can be changed by road construction or nature. Road signs can be defaced, fall down, or even stolen. Advice from others can be extremely dangerous. We all know people who don’t know the difference between right and left or the distance between one mile or five.  And then, can we trust ourselves?

I believe nature gives us the best directions. We know the sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. We also know that the North Star is always in the north. Thus, we can then deduct that south is the other direction.) The main obstacle to these natural guideposts is nature itself; cloudy skies and storms blocking them from our view. The solution is to simply wait until the storms pass and the sun and the stars return. Even if we choose to push our way through the dark and cloudy skies, once the skies clear we can turn around and correct our direction with nature’s map. That directs us down the literal path, but what about our true path?

I once read that intuition is God’s greatest gift to us; He is talking directly to us. But are we listening and if so, are we listening with a clear heart and mind? My personal belief is that we know when we are doing something wrong, whether we want to admit it or not. We don’t need a law, a book, a politician or clergyman to tell us. We already know. I also believe that we can also know when we are doing the right thing. We don’t need recognition or a reward for that either.

If we continue to walk down the wrong path, disguised as the right path, it may feel good for a brief time. But eventually the truth catches up and pulls us down into a life of disgruntlement.  When we do the right thing in a hard situation, then any struggle experienced is short-lived and followed up with a feeling of peace.

I recently came across this inspirational saying. The only credit for authorship I could find was that it came from a Navajo Indian philosophy:

There is beauty before me, and there is beauty behind me

There is beauty to my left, and there is beauty to my right

There is beauty above me, and there is beauty below me

There is beauty all around me, and there is beauty within me

I suggest that when you come to that fork in the road, you look at all of your choices of path, then go the Navajo way.