Everywhere you go, people are telling you where you should be heading. Work hard! Hustle. Be a doctor. Be a lawyer. Be an engineer. Or better yet, start a startup. Be a billionaire. 

Everyday, there’s a new silver bullet being paddled on the internet. This is what you need to do to achieve. This is what success looks like. Here’s how to earn your billion dollars. 

Do you follow? A thousand paths, a thousand ways, a thousand glittery and glorious lives you could end up with. So attractive, so tempting. 

But recently, I’d been thinking. There is no path that anyone can make for me. It was their path, and their’s alone. Would it be helpful for me? Maybe in some way. But it’ll only go so far. In the end, to fulfil your fullest, you make your own.  

“Walk­er, there is no path; the path is made by walking.” - Anto­nio Macha­do

I’d been following well-worn paths laid out in gold before me, all my life. I’d be wearing shoes made for me by others, for a thousand miles. But lately, I’m realising, the shoes weren’t made for me specifically. It pinches my toes in an awkward way. It changes my gait, makes me walk faster than I should. My legs are weary from the shoes, but I never knew. Until now. I wore these shoes well, and walked much in them. But now, I have to let them go. May I go barefoot. May I make my own shoes from straw or leather. But my own I shall make, and walk in them I shall go.

I don’t know if this is just another path by someone else. Could it be? But I see no one pointing it out ahead of me, no one smiling. No promised land. No pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Just whispers of a quiet joy in my heart, while standing before a primal wilderness of mountains and rivers… without paths. 

Take this path. It leads to Nirvana.

Excuse me.
I’ll go where I want to.
Over rocky crags or under water.

The Master’s path is the corpse’s path.

 - “The Path” in Beyond Self: 100 Korean Zen Poems by Ko Un

I’m willing to bet, this is not the corpse’s path before me.