As I try to find my way

The Retune Blog - 2nd February 2024

Have you ever been following instructions for a walk when after about half-an-hour in you read those fateful words head north at the junction. Every time I find myself in this situation I seem to have a map, the instructions, but no compass. More often than not I find myself having to retrace my steps back to the start of the journey.

This week’s song choice, Broken Compass by Five Bolt Main, isn’t about going on a physical walk, but considers what happens when on our life journey we become concerned that our life compass is broke:

As I try to find my way, this broken compass seems to lead so much further away.

All of us experience times in life when we feel we might have lost our way. Perhaps we feel overwhelmed, at odds with who we have become, or feel we are not doing or being what or who we wanted to be in life. The song reflects on all these ideas, and that it’s times like this when we need to make sure we are in tune with our life compass.

Our life compass is the part of us which keeps us on track. It involves us making use of a number of aspects of our decision making and ethical faculties:

• The logical self - making choices using our logical abilities is a fantastic starting point, but this needs to be combined with something else;

• The emotional self - our logic needs to interact with our hopes and dreams to make it applicable to us as individuals rather than people in a generalised sense. This also needs to be guided by;

• The ethical self - how we view life; our values and what we see as important needs to be at the heart of our hopes and dreams. But all of these things also sit in a further context;

• The communal self - we don’t exist just as individuals, so all of our decisions and choices also impact those around us. So, the communal aspect of decision making should also form an important part of developing our life compass.

One final thing to note is that all of these aspects of our being are also influenced externally. We don’t form our logical, emotional, ethical or communal self purely from our own influence but also from the influence of external sources. As such, it’s important to calibrate our internal compass through measuring it up with external influences which we feel to be important.

Why not take some time over a cup of coffee this week to re-examine and re-calibrate your internal compass?