The Restless Soul

There’s a restlessness within every soul, some part of us that’s uneasy and anxious.  There’s something in us that won’t let us rest until we find love; not the romantic, cheesy kind of love you see in the movies, but the real deal.  I’m talking about a gentle love that gives you peace, one that calms your soul and leaves you knowing you are finally accepted just as you are.  That’s the love our souls seek.  And we will search for it relentlessly, every day we’re alive.  Like a person dying of hunger, we will go anywhere and do anything to get fed because we know our very life depends on it.

 

Few people understand themselves.  They don’t know why they’re willing to risk so much for love or do the silly things they do in pursuit of it.  They don’t know why they’re so willing to quit a job, leave home and move to another city just to be with someone they met on the internet.  They don’t know why they keep going back to the same person asking to be loved when love has been withheld by that person their whole life.   They don’t understand their soul’s intense and demanding need for unconditional love. 

 

Many people spend a lifetime looking for the right thing in the wrong place.  They try to fulfill their soul’s desire for love by using their bodies.  They use them for sexual pleasure.  But after the body is pleasured, the soul is still restless, still unfulfilled. So, they have to keep finding new partners for sex just to find some sense of ease.  For many, this becomes an addiction, an endless cycle of accepting less than what their soul truly longs for.

 

Others, lead lives of “quiet desperation,” as Thoreau wrote.  Instead of searching for their soul’s destiny, they give up their search and find something to comfort their loss.  Some people use food for comfort, others use alcohol, drugs or shopping.

 

Inevitably they all fail because nothing material will ever fully satisfy the soul.  Its restlessness isn’t about getting something, it’s about giving something.  Contrary to the daily messages we receive from the consumer-addicted society in which we live, our greatest joy doesn’t come from acquisition, it comes from giving our gifts to each other and to the world around us.

 

That’s what the soul truly longs for.  That’s what the restlessness is really all about.  It’s not a desperate longing for a husband, wife or mate.  It’s a deep desire within us to share our lives and all of the good in them.  It’s a need to contribute something of value to another soul—-to give the very thing we seek; unconditional love.

 

But since we can’t give what we don’t first possess.  The soul’s journey always begins inside.  Eventually if we don’t make a conscious choice on our own to look within, circumstances in life will demand it.   Life has a series of pre-ordained wake up calls designed to jolt the soul back to reality.  Anyone who’s lost a loved one, been through a nasty divorce or been unemployed for a lengthy period will tell you going through that experience created a dramatic change of course in their lives.  It forced them to rethink what’s important and really worth giving their time to.  All of it contributes to the advancement of our soul’s journey.  Nothing is ever completely bad.  We gain value from every experience in life, even the ones we wish never happened. 

 

The road inward is the soul’s first step on its journey.  The road to self-acceptance has to be traveled first before it can give or receive the most valuable gift life has to offer.