Don’t you love the maps found in large shopping malls or office complexes? The first thing you see is the circle with the X inside it saying “You are here.”

“Oh,” you say, “This is where I am, so now I know which direction to turn to get to where I want to be.”

Without the knowledge of where you are, you can’t know how close or far away you are from your destination. Just so, it’s important to know where you are in the great scheme of things in life. This question presupposes that you know something about the big picture and something about your destination (destiny).

And within these questions: “Who am I?”

My mother always told me, “Just be yourself, and you’ll be fine.” But who is that self? And how do you find out?

Questions, questions. When you’re searching for truth, what you often find first are questions to be explored if not answered definitively. Your answers may change and grow from time to time.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. And behind that statement?

Well, that assumes you have a life to begin with. That means you have to live life first in order to examine it. If it is true that the unexamined life is not worth living, then it follows that the unlived life is also not worth examining.

Aspiring writers and actors are often told, “First, you have to live.” You have to have something to write about and experiences to draw upon.

Thoughtful and juicy questions may be one of the best ways to explore and examine your life to allow you to fully live and appreciate the life you have here and now, rather than wishing for some other place or some other life. This is what you have. Now is what you have. Here is what you have. Work with what you have.

If you’re in the here and now, just look about you. Be here. Be now. Describe what you see, feel, smell, taste, hear, touch. You’ll soon enough find plenty to think about and write about, plenty to ponder.

Formal writing prompts and jump-start quotations can also be brilliant food for thought. And why do they appeal to you? Because they’ve acted as an entrance into your own inner life. Something within you resonated with what you found in someone else’s experience.

Reading biographies, memoirs, autobiographies, and fiction can help you to explore your own life stories, both old and new. Can help you re-interpret your past stories to use them as building blocks for your new paths.

You learn that you are not alone in all the world. You no longer have to remain “a stranger in a strange land.” You can find at least one other story that is remarkably like your own. You learn that others have faced and surmounted the same challenges that you do. “The way is thoroughly known,” wrote Joseph Campbell. You are not the first to tread this path, to make this journey.

And those who have gone before you have left maps. They have pointed out the rocks, crevasses, mountains, dangerous swamps and quicksand. They can inspire you to a new level of living. By showing you what peace and happiness they have attained. They can teach you if you will read, listen, and be open to learning.

Be teachable.

Practice beginner’s mind at whatever stage you find yourself, and you may find that one or more “maps” buried in your library, bookstore, or Internet sites will both show you the big picture and say to you, “You are here.”

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Great List of Personal Development Blogs:

From Gretchen Rubin’s post on her wonderful Happiness Project blog, I learned of a list of the top blogs in the personal development field. These are 65 of the most-read of blogs that offer regular, practical, and usable information. Check it out at:

http://www.pluginid.com/personal-development/

Sometimes a new life story develops gradually, growing and gaining strength beneath the surface. “Roads not taken” often do that. For one reason or another you consciously take a path and leave others untaken, then over the course of months or years, that path reappears, often in a different form giving us undreamed of possibilities.

Sometimes a new life story “happens itself upon us” in an instant. A chance meeting, a letter, a phone call, a change in a relationship, an illness, a promotion, and suddenly everything is different. Everything up for re-evaluation. New decisions to make. New paths to explore. The unknown to wrestle.

At such times, a journal can be your best friend. Write to know what you think and feel. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” wrote E. M. Forster. Just explore your now. What is it like? What seems like a reasonable next step?

One way to use a journal for new life stories is to explore “what ifs?” in imagination. What would it be like if…” How will I cope with…? If you write several scenarios, you will have covered all the known bases. Sometimes this kind of writing is like blazing paths before us, making possible what has been improbable or impossible. Writers often do this in writing new paths. It is as if they are consciously or unconsciously laying out a new road to travel in their novels, then their personal life often follows along the trail blazed by the fiction.

How to know when a new life story is beginning? Ask your deepest and highest self by asking in your journal. Talk to friends and people you trust. Be open to the goodness the universe has to offer, no matter in what form it arrives.

As Robert Browning wrote, “Greet the unseen with a cheer.”