Where’s my sign?

Lately I've been watching other people receive their signs.

You know the ones. The friend who leaves her job and the perfect opportunity appears within the week. The acquaintance whose career seems choreographed: doors opening on cue, synchronicities arriving like clockwork, as though the universe keeps a scheduled diary for some people and forgets the rest of us exist.

I kept waiting for mine.

Which was strange, because I love my work. My days are full of things I chose and would choose again. But somewhere along the way I'd absorbed the idea that loving your life doesn't count as evidence, that real purpose announces itself. A booming voice from somewhere above. Something grand, because surely I was meant for something grand.

Nothing came. So I plodded on.

I want to defend plodding, actually. It gets a bad name. Plodding is just showing up, day after day, for a life you've built. But when everyone around you seems to be receiving cosmic confirmation, plodding starts to feel like a consolation prize.

Then, a few days ago, a writer named John Strelecky followed me on Instagram. I couldn't shake the feeling I'd heard his name before. I scrolled his grid trying to place him, and there it was: The Café on the Edge of the World, a book that had been sitting in my Amazon cart for over a year.

Books come and go from that cart all the time. Most get quietly removed, and I couldn't tell you why. This one stayed. For more than a year, it stayed.

So I bought it. It arrived yesterday, and today I took it out to lunch. I read it in a little café here in Tokyo, over raw fish and shiso, and somewhere between chapters the irony landed. There I was, reading The Café on the Edge of the World in a café that would probably feel like the edge of the world to someone reading this from the other side of it. To me it was just lunch. It's where I live.

That's the thing about a life: from the inside, it always looks ordinary.

The book itself is a small story about a traveller who wanders into a café where the menu asks him three questions about the life he's living. Simple questions. Nowhere near easy ones. More than six million people have read it, and I understood why almost immediately.

But here's what stayed with me most. The book never once suggests that purpose has to look grand. When a life is built around purpose, a kind of success does follow, but that success is shaped entirely by the purpose it grew from. For one person it looks like a stage. For another it looks like a garden, or a classroom, or a quiet room where people come to rest.

And I realised I'd been standing in my purpose the whole time, scanning the sky for lightning bolts.

I do believe I'm living my purpose. I thought about last Friday's class, guiding students in savasana: tracing a line of attention from the outside in, around the lower ribs, to the place where the ribs meet the sternum, then down to that soft spot a few centimetres below, where the solar plexus lives. The place where we grip without ever noticing. I invited them to let it soften. And I watched every single student release: stop holding themselves up and let themselves be held instead. I'm not sure the students were even aware of it; it's that subtle. But it's exactly what's needed at the end of a class. It isn't grand.

My life fits me. But comparison, the highlight reels and some old story about grandness had hoodwinked me into believing I needed more. That I needed to do more. That what I had, and what I was, wasn't enough.

It is enough. It was enough all along.

And maybe that's the joke the universe was playing. The sign did come. It just didn't come as lightning. It came as a paperback that waited patiently in a cart for a year until I was ready to hear what it had to say. And what it said, more or less, was: stop looking. You're already home.