Every once in a while it feels like life throws us a curve ball or puts up a road block that makes us question what we are doing and why we are doing it, and to have that more immediate reaction of “why bother” or “I just wasted time and energy.” You know that feeling (and some may say it out loud) of “well, that’s hours of my life that I wasted” or “can’t get back.”

It is, for the most part, a normal human reaction. Be it time and energy invested in a relationship, job, project, etc., when something happens that feels like It halts progress, changes how we feel, what we do or how we do it, we tend to initially feel betrayed—after all, we were hoping and believing that the experiences we were having were going to result in something, deliver us a next step up the proverbial ladder of success, or get us connected to new people or places that would serve some purpose for our purpose.

I am a firm believer in experiences and that there is no such thing as time or energy wasted. From every experience we learn, grow, evolve and progress. But sometimes we get a bit off center about the experience. As we embrace that any given path we are on—with persons we encounter, situations or challenges we navigate, hurdles we overcome and emotions we feel—will deliver something tangible and an outcome that will get us to the “next level,” open a door to a new opportunity or fulfill us. 

And when after investing time and energy on this path, a wrench gets thrown in, we can sometimes think of ourselves as a fool. But the only foolish thing was losing sight—even for a few moments—that it is not about the end game or getting to the next level. It is not about a deliverable for the hope or expectation we held. It is simply about the experience—nothing more and nothing less.

In a way, all roads lead to nothing if you are thinking in a liner fashion and that the road will lead you somewhere, with somewhere defined as a destination or end point. Think about it this way. There are no destinations or end points.  There is a flow of interactions, events, emotions and feelings that are all part of your experiences.

Life really is a collection of endless and timeless experiences—essentially a continuous string of them. When we start to overlay expectations on our experiences or desire an experience to result in something tangible with some time line attached to it, this is where we can start to feel a bit betrayed or deflated and think that the Universe is working against us. Sometimes we put too much emphasis on what our purpose in life is. Our purpose is to experience and through those individual experiences we are part of the Universal whole.

There is no “end” in life because your life is not about fulfilling any fixed agenda. Your life is energy experiencing itself. Your life energy—as in all energy—never stops. It flows. When you remove the mind-set of thinking of your life as a project plan with milestones and key deliverables, and simply let the process of your life unfold you will be able to be more in the moment and appreciate your experiences for creating the every evolving you. All you encounter, all the people you meet on your path and all you feel are there for a reason—with that reason being for you to just experience.