"What You Seek Is Seeking You!"

What if I tell you, that whatever it is you are looking for or seeking in your life to appear, is in turn, seeking you? Doesn’t that sound incredible? It is one of the most wonderful feelings in the world to know that what we are longing for is longing for us too.

In one of the casual conversation with my roommate one day, she said something that got stuck on my mind for quite some time. After having one of our routine conversations about my goals, the efforts I was putting to get them and all the things I was hoping to achieve, she just said: “be careful what you set your heart upon. Don’t attach yourself to any outcome as it rarely does manifest”

I didn’t want to believe her: “why wouldn’t I think about the outcome for which I am putting all the efforts”. It just didn’t go with my way of thinking. I always felt that if I do not attach myself to the outcomes I want, I wouldn’t be doing enough for them to occur. So she explained: “stay in the present, remain focused and do what you are doing at the present in the best way possible instead of thinking about the outcome – if you can find a way to let go, what you want will find its way to you.”

After giving it some thought, I realized that I had heard something similar once before. A story about a girl who was chasing fireflies. It went like this more or less:

There was a girl who was sitting in her garden looking up into the sky. She noticed some fireflies hovering over her head whose light just dazzled her. She instantly stood up, started running in the dark trying to catch the fireflies. She was so mesmerized with what she saw; she wanted to have it no matter what. She put up nets, traps, ran up and down, and just tried everything but was not able to catch even a single firefly. After few after minutes of running here and there, she was out of her breath, all sweaty, giving up on her goal to catch the fireflies. Tired, she sat down on the ground, and seconds later some fireflies slowly approached her, again flew around her head, and then sat around her body.

The “what you want will find its way to you” concept was very evident in this story of the girl and the fireflies. When we want something really bad or a particular outcome for any scenario we channelize all our energy, stress and anxiety to that particular outcome. We often start thinking about the negative scenarios that if the outcome is not in our favor what may happen. We often start stressing and fearing for any negative outcome. And this is where we push the positive outcome away, scare it, distance it from us. But if we shift our minds to a place of patience, to self-control, to complete peace with whatever outcome, we create the right environment for what we want to come to us, to attract it, and awaken it.

My roommate pointed it out quite correctly; it is not an act of indifference or laziness. It’s actually an act of working hard, remaining focused, and staying in the present – and not stressing out over what might or might not happen.

Often Rumi’s words are mistranslated or misinterpreted. The title of this post can be interpreted or looked from different angles. But for me, the true essence of Rumi’s iconic phrase is “what you seek is seeking you – you just need to let it to flow to you, without any pain, seamlessly and effortlessly.”

This is to celebrating a life attached less to outcomes and more to living in the present.

-Rumi