Doing the next right thing

Feeling into how to live is like starting a drawing. You just begin.

Thomas Cole, from the Voyage of Life series

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live,” Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. So how ought one best figure out how to live? It’s an existential question I found myself returning to time and again.

Carl Jung, in a letter offering guidance on how to navigate life, once wrote: “One lives as one can. [...] If you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other … [and] quietly do the next and most necessary thing.”

There is so much clear-sighted wisdom in Jung’s words, but how do we determine the next and most necessary thing, and then the one after that? Life often feels like a push and pull, between intentional choice and the randomness of chance, between the illusion of control and the pull of one’s cravings and impulses.

I often enough tried to map out my future in my imagination, to be a few steps ahead before taking my next step.

Life rarely conform with our fuzzy imaginings though. But we at least excel at this skill: making sense of our lives backwards. Now that I’m older and reflect on the life path I’ve taken so far, I sometimes marvel at how certain parts appear almost choreographed. Schopenhauer’s wondrous question about life appears timeless: “Who wrote this novel?”—his startling answer: “You did.” Our life’s messy twists and turns of experience (or what remains of it in our memory) seem to have arranged themselves into hard-won coherence and patters of meaning we now live by. A narrative, a more or less fuzzy outline of a life story.

So is something deeper here at play that we can harness? Could life be following some intelligent rhythm, with different names for it like serendipity or synchronicity, that tries to guide us toward where we’re meant to go? Or is what we may perceive as synchronicity our mere attempt to invent and add hindsight meaning to our lives and just a comforting illusion, perhaps?

Friedrich Nietzsche was dismissive of synchronicity and regarded it as a trap of spiritual unfreedom. A few decades later, Jung offered a counterpoint. Synchronicities, he argued, are “an ever present reality for those with eyes to see.” Jung believed that much of how we experience and create our lives may emerge in the dialogue between ourselves and the world, a co-creation shaped by our attention, perception, and openness. Can we therefore sharpen an intuitive responsiveness to subtle and half-hidden signposts we come across in life that seem to guide us along the way?

To be clear, what I am hinting at here is not some blind following of dogma or woohoo beliefs. Interestingly, the same Nietzsche who was dismissive of outright synchronicity still urged us to listen to the cues of our conscience, as if imploring us to awaken our sleeping heroes within. He shouted at us and our hesitations: “Be Yourself! All that you are now doing, thinking, desiring, all that is not you.” Then he asked, “What have you truly loved thus far? What has ever uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time?” What simple (not easy) and profound advice: perfection in life can never be the goal. Instead, Nietzsche urged us to follow with courage what resonates, and become our own heroes on the journeys toward our truth.

This journey, whether we ultimately believe in whether it’ shaped by synchronicities or not, is of course no easy promenade. Being alive is messy, uncertain, and full of unexpected events and emotional upheaval. We all have eaten chalk. But we have also, despite the mess of it, created something so uniquely ours.

My own life was in part shaped by a few bold, impulsive decisions. Like for instance my leap from Europe to America years ago, or my transitioning from a busy career to a new (and quite pathless) path. Still, what stands out most though, at least in hindsight, are my many less stark choices along the way. The largest landmass of my life was traversed one step at a time, arranging themselves like uneven but fitting pearls strung along a delicate chain. One courageous foot in front of the next, often vulnerably and sometimes awkwardly.

Over time, especially in the last five, six years, I’ve grown more and more accepting and welcoming to what is coming my way. What has helped me is a practice of leaning more into life’s trusting this: my own delicate resonance with what feels meaningful to me in the present moment.

Attractors and the Belief in Meaning

Love is the felt-sense of a meaningful life as the result of integration and consciousness with the flow.—Tom Morgan

This felt sense of resonance has become a sort of compass for me. Could Jung be right that such resonance may even be a beckoning from my future self¹ , gently drawing me into alignment with what matters? Either way, I decided to pragmatically adopt a stronger belief in this. Because what is there to lose if I bank on my very own intuition of doing the next thing that feels authentic and right, and as a welcome counterweight to my natural bias toward hesitancy.

Tom Morgan, founder and inspired guide of the Leading Edge community, first introduced me to the idea of attractors. He describes them as “a force that helps intelligently and benignly guide us into our unique niche in life. [,..] Where what only we can do is what the world needs.”

What an extraordinary insight: doing the next right thing as the following of our inner north star of resonance and radiance that–subjectively–seems to surrounds the things or people we love or find beautiful. What elevates and inspires us, what holds our attention and makes us feel alive, often appeals to us with alluring intensity. These attractors, somehow embedded in certain places, ideas, or people, shimmer with hues of interestingness. I believe the “attractor intelligence” resides in our hearts, intuiting us towards resonant patterns that link to our purpose, work, or niche in life. A force of intelligence that we can pick up on best when we are present to actually perceive it.

Which brings us to the power of attention itself.

Attention and a Wider View

Every beginning
is only a sequel, after all,
and the book of events
is always open halfway through.
—”Love at First Sight”; closing verse of the poem by Wisława Szymborska

Consciousness applies its force through its crucial lens: attention. Renowned neuroscientist Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s work deepens our understanding of how attention shapes our reality and connects us to what we love. Our ways of seeing can be infused with more relevance and meaning if we approach the world with a broader and more compassionate, heart-led awareness. He writes:

“What is required is an attentive response to something real and other than ourselves, of which we have only inklings at first, but which comes more and more into being through our response to it—if we are truly responsive to it. We nurture it into being; or not. In this it has something of the structure of love.”²

The quality of our attention is guided by what we love, and what we love becomes the world we recognize. As McGilchrist explains, this act of recognition actively shapes how we experience our reality, how it is “firmed up—and brought into being.”

The brave act of generating meaning

Do you have the courage to bring forth the treasures that are hidden within you?—Elizabeth Gilbert

Uncovering and expressing our authentic selves requires the courage to follow the slender threads of resonance as they show in our lives. It can’t be a coincidence that the etymological origin of courage is the old Norman French word coeur (heart): courage leads back to the heart.

I’ve long valued the practice of dedicated reading and, more recently, of writing for cues of meaning. When I truly engage with a book—and they often find their way to me serendipitously—it can feel as though the words hold up a mirror. By stepping into someone else’s perspective, I may also gain new insights about me and the world. Reading and writing help me to reframe situations where I still may feel stuck or unsure, or where I find inspiration from new ideas that feel meaningful to me.

There’s something almost magical about how, once I hold a certain idea or question in mind, I can create a mental and magnetic bucket for it, and what the writer James Somers described as “an attractor and generator of thought. [...] I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better. Everything will mean more to me.” This is one of the many ways how I pick up the insight that I may need for my next right step.

E.L. Doctorov once said: “You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the right trip that way.” The path of our life before us will forever remain foggy and uncertain. But what we can do is engage directly, and with our heart, with what presents right in this moment, and then the next. We can participate courageously in our lives.

We do the next right thing.

1. Carl Jung expressed the idea of a future version of ourselves that is trying to manifest itself in the present moment by directing our attention towards things of interest. In his work, he also discussed the teleological nature of the psyche, indicating that our psychological development is oriented toward future goals and potentials. This perspective suggests that our future self exerts an influence on our current behavior, guiding us toward self-realization and wholeness. See for example "The Structure and Dynamic of Self” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (Collected Works of Jung, Vol. 9, Part 1)

2. McGilchrist, Iain. The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. London: Perspective Press, 2021.