Follow only your own voice, save the only life you can save.

It’s tempting to listen to other people's voices, but they can be so loud that we forget to listen to our own.

Our voice inside is often hard to find because we forget to look inside and find the calm to find it.

Once we find it, we need to trust and follow the only voice we can follow and save the only life we can save, our own.

I have been thinking about this daily for years, I like to summarize it with “follow your guts.”

An indigenous friend says, “I only listen to the stars,” which comes back to the same, just more poetic.

Thanks, @aainslie, for the beautiful reminder in my inbox this morning, in the form of this beautiful poem by Mary Oliver (1935-2019), The Journey (the text follows the video).

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.