4 Ways To Know It’s Time To Walk Away (From Anything In Life)

Last week I watched, along with 17 million others, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tell their story on national television. For me, it really was a story of bravery and fierce courage in so many ways. There’s no doubt that Meghan’s willingness to open up about her deep challenges around her own struggles with depression and mental health saved lives. I don’t know if there really was anything more profound in this interview than Meghan’s willingness to be so brazenly honest about how she was haunted by suicidal ideations. I’m still in awe as I think about how she was so effortlessly poised even as her naked soul was exposed for the world to see. I can’t even begin to imagine the amount of people who now feel less alone in their own struggles with depression and mental health.

I know I do.

Furthermore, I couldn’t help but to think about the millions of people out there that are feeling trapped in their own lives and while maybe they haven’t yet found the courage to make hard decisions, they witnessed two brave souls mirror back to them that it is possible.

I found myself leaning closer toward the television with each word that came out of Prince Harry’s mouth as I was being reminded of a simple but yet profound truth that we can so easily forget—that we can do hard things.

For a few days, I found myself thinking about all the times that I have felt the call to walk away from things in my life that no longer serve me. Whether it was the NFL, a relationship, a job, or a city, I have felt that knock on my heart’s door and while answering that knock has been incredibly challenging, it has transformed my life in some of the most unimaginable ways.

And truthfully, I can’t help but to think that we all feel that knock at some point and time in our lives.

To be clear, that knock doesn’t mean that you have to turn your back on your current responsibilities. It doesn’t always mean that you have to quit your job or leave your marriage. But what it does mean, is that you are being called to surrender what no longer supports the exploration of your truest self and it will require you to loosen your beliefs about the world and the way you exist in it. Only then can we open ourselves up to the infinite possibilities that our soul, that God, has in store for us that will lead us to a more satisfying life.

It’s challenging, I know.

While you feel one thing in your heart and in your body, the moment your head gets involved, it’s so easy to rationalize and convince yourself that what you’re doing is silly, selfish or wrong. Before you know it, you talk yourself out of it and you move on with the routine of your life.

Maybe you can relate, but one of the reasons why it was so challenging for me to initially say yes to the invitation being left on my heart’s door was that I couldn’t understand if what I was feeling was an invitation into a deeper, more expansive, more soulfully aligned life.? Or, if it was just a rogue feeling or a deep need for a vacation, or just an excuse to walk away from my responsibility and I was about to make the biggest mistake of my life.

Fortunately, we don’t have to navigate those questions alone as there are ways to tell if the call is an invitation from our heart, from God, leading us one step deeper into our destinies. Joseph Campbell talks about four of them.

1. If it is a true call from our soul, then responding to it is not an avoidance of responsibility, but rather a facing of something difficult, something unknown and frightening. It feels more like a compelling need to walk into the mouth of a whale or out in the night and into a storm.

2. It can feel like déjà vu. Almost like you’ve been here before, you resonate with it, it makes sense to you even though you can’t logically explain it.

3. This is a big one. You have this unwavering and undeniable knowing that the chapter of your life that you’ve been living in is now over—whether you wanted it to end or not. Or, everything that was once important to you, your goals and ambitions, are no longer as important and you’re left asking, what now?

4. A true call usually comes when least expected and disguised as a disruption in life. Maybe you’ve lost your job, your relationship or even a loved one. Your life has been turned upside down and you’re left with the decision of going back to the way things once were, or stepping out into the unknown.

I want to leave you today with a poem from David Whyte. I know that some of you who are reading this right now know exactly what you’re supposed to do. Some of you reading this might not resonate with it right now, but one day down the road you, too, will realize what you have to do.

Regardless if it’s now or sometime in the near or distant future, I hope you remember that the world was made to be free in.

…Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.