All paths lead to God
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, I feel a brewing in the collective. Battle lines are being drawn along red and blue, and the temperature is rising in the rampant polarisation that has come to define this century. I sense we are buckling in for a long winter of adversarial discourse and heightened us-and-themism, last felt in the wake of George Floyd’s murder back in 2020. I will write on what I see coming, and how those of us devoted to loving across lines of difference might position ourselves in this moment. But this piece of writing is more personal, though I believe still relevant.
This year I have been traversing my own map of us-and-them, grappling with the impulse to make other belief systems and ways of living wrong in order to make mine right.
So within, as without.
I am in many ways your quintessential seeker (I know many of you are too, that is why you are here). For as long as I can remember I have wanted to live a meaningful life, searching high and low for my answer to Mary Oliver’s haunting question: “tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
In this search I have ventured onto many paths, but there has always been this underlying sense within me that I need to find the right path. And that when I finally find this right path, my life will start. And with this, throughout my life, in search of the right path, my mechanism has been to make all other paths wrong. When I quit my corporate career to become a meditation teacher travelling the world, I told myself that the corporate world was empty and soulless. When I ventured back into the organisational world as an entrepreneur years later, I told myself that being a meditation teacher was ungrounded and escapist. For one to be right, the other had to be wrong.
Something shifted this year, shortly after my 37th birthday. I felt not old, but certainly not young anymore. I felt confronted with the truth that I was nearing, or entering, the second half of my life. And with that came the crystalline truth: this life I have been looking for is here. I am already in my life. Deep in it.
I have often thought of the many sliding door moments that could take my life in radically different directions. I sometimes find my mind wandering to the endless possibilities of what life could be.
When we are born we are bundles of possibility. We could be ballerinas in New York, lawyers in London, wandering poets with nothing but a backpack. But at 37, I felt those infinite branches narrow. Some futures became implausible, others impossible. I will never be a prima ballerina. I will never live a life untouched by motherhood. I will never walk away from the spiritual thread that has always run through me. Certain doors have closed, and in closing they have fixed the shape of my life in ways I cannot undo.
One of the greatest sliding door moments of my life has been mine and Jack’s move to Ibiza three years ago. Our lives changed in ways I couldn’t have imagined. Me, a city girl through and through, now live deep in the countryside; my children speak Spanish; I spend my time with people from all over the world I would never otherwise have crossed paths with.
Travelling back to London, where we both grew up, carries this dreamy sense of nostalgia, not only for what was, but for what could have been. On this particular trip we did a house swap with a dear friend who had just bought a place less than a mile from where I grew up. Walking to the corner shop I passed the hospital I was born in, my first school, the high street where my friends and I drank Bacardi Breezers (remember that era?), the first club we blagged our way into. Every corner was steeped in memory and life lived.
For me, this area not only represents the life that was lived but also the life that could still be lived. One night, looking out over London, I felt it strongly: this could be my life. If Jack and I had chosen to root here, we’d probably be raising our kids in this neighbourhood, surrounded by parents and familiarity. In the past I would have found a way to make that wrong, too city, too familiar, too small. But in that moment I could just admit: it would have been pretty alright.
And in that quiet clarity, I heard a phrase, whether from within or beyond me, I do not know: All paths lead to God.
By “God” I do not mean the figure in paintings or the God of one tradition. I mean what sits beneath all our names for it: life itself, truth, awakening, contentment, the mystery that holds us. Whatever language we reach for, it is the same current.
We seekers spend so much time searching, only to discover that all paths are, in their essence, the right path. They are just different versions of life living through us.
When I returned to Ibiza, I kept turning these questions in my heart. What are these paths anyway? I began to explore the paths I have danced with in my search for meaning and began to trace a certain archetypal map of meaning making.
There was the path of living: the path that says “life is here to be experienced, we are here in a human body to dance, to feast, to suffer, to rejoice, for it is in living that we find meaning.” A path followed by hedonists, artists, mystics alike, the ones who believe we are here to taste the fullness of being human.
There was the path of understanding: the path that says “we are here to understand why we are here, for only in making sense of life does it become meaningful.” The path of philosophers, scientists, spiritual seekers. They may disagree on frameworks, but their impulse is the same: to understand what is happening here.
And finally there was the path of making things better: the one that says “the highest expression of life is to be of service to others.” Saints, activists, healers who live to leave the world better than they found it.
Of course, most of us are a mix of all three, and we might move in and out of them over a lifetime or even in a single day. There are surely many other categories (if you see some, share them with me; let’s flesh it out together!). But at the point I arrived in my exploration, these categories helped me make sense. For my fellow Potter-heads, you might recognise Hufflepuff (living), Ravenclaw (understanding), and Gryffindor (making things better). Different perspectives, same school.
As I looked at my own dance with these different archetypal paths, I felt the ghost of something else, different but deeply present, in my own life and in the collective. Sadly for literary continuity, it is not an expression of Slytherin.
The path of drifting: not choosing, not living deeply, not seeking, not creating, but being swept along, often dissatisfied, restless, resentful.
In modern cultural discourse this might be described as living from a “victim mindset”, in spiritual circles “unconscious” living. But it too is still life living through us.
It is still valid and held inside the great mystery. Perhaps it too has its own magic my mind can’t grasp. And yet, it felt different. Less walking, more drifting down a lazy river. Valid, yes. But perhaps not worthy in the deeper sense of the word. The word worthy comes from Middle English worthi. Its root can be traced back to Proto-Germanic werþaz and the Proto-Indo-European root wert-, which originally meant "to turn" or "to become". There is an inherent sense of movement, of engagement in its coding.
The path of living says: life is happening for me.
The path of understanding says: life is happening, and I must make sense of it.
The path of making things better says: I am happening to life.
The path of drifting: life is happening to me (often accompanied by the feeling that I do not like it and can’t do anything about it).
And so to return to these times, which path is the most meaningful? Which is the most worthy?
It has long been one of my gripes with activism that it seems to me that the primary activity of much of modern activism is telling other people that the way they are choosing to live their lives is in some way insufficient, or that the things they believe are good and true are in fact not good and true but bad and false. I have long felt that a truly sacred activism, where the primary imperative is to be in service to life itself, wears many faces, and that we are each here to walk our own paths.
But walk we must. All our seeking leads us here, not to the perfect path, but to the simple, courageous act of walking with life.
And in a world that feels like it is burning, and at the very same moment we are growing more divided, perhaps this is what matters most: that we learn to deeply honour the paths of others and commit to walking our own, whatever that may look like.