Finding Yourself in the Perhapses

 First published: 4 October 2025. Updated: 9 February 2026

The only certainty in life is not death, as they say; it’s that there are many perhapses and many maybes. In each perhaps hides a new beginning. In each maybe lies a precious treasure. In our hectic, goal-driven rush to either survive or surpass others, we frequently rush past unique encounters with life’s delights. In this post, I hope to stir your curiosity for what hides in your perhapses and maybes and, in looking for them on your way to your goals, help you find yourself.

The Journey Matters More Than the Destination

I’m not saying we shouldn’t have life goals. It’s good to have goals, otherwise we just meander through life. But the state you are in when you reach the goal depends on how you journeyed to get there without losing yourself, or others, in the process.

What matters isn’t the goal itself. What matters is that as you journey towards it, you search, learn, grow, and discover something about yourself that you didn’t know. Perhaps it’s the emergence of a different side of you; a stronger you; one who feels like you’ve discovered something awe-inspiring and wonderful. Aren’t you even slightly curious to see what or who you might encounter along your quest?

The Quest That Whispers

The thing about quests is that they’re not only for storybook or movie heroes, and they don’t announce themselves with trumpets and fanfare. They whisper. They nudge. They show up as curiosities in ordinary moments. Most of us refuse the call without even knowing that we’ve refused it. Or we hear it and decide that it’s easier to stay where we are. Or we’re too focused on the distant peak to notice the trailhead right at our feet.

But what if the journey is where you meet yourself? Not the you that you think you should be, nor the you that reaches some predetermined destination, but the you that emerges when you pay attention to what’s directly in front of you right now. The journey to your goals isn’t an unknown void. It’s a place filled with maybes and perhapses and abilities waiting to be discovered as you go.

Three Abilities for Discovery

To navigate this journey of self-discovery, you already possess everything you need. Think of these not as tools for achievement, but as instruments for revelation.

1: Your Wonder-Spotting Ability

Your eyes do more than help you reach targets. They can teach you how to notice. Try shifting between a narrow and wide focus. Look intently at one small detail, for instance, the vein of a leaf, the crack in a wall, the expression on a stranger’s face that mirrors something you’ve felt but never named.

This is about training yourself to focus intensely, not on targets, but on discoveries. What happens when you give your full attention to something small? A conversation you’d normally rush through. A task you usually automate. A feeling you typically suppress.

As you build this ability, you discover that life isn’t the big destination ahead, but about the secret treasure right there: you.

2: Your Present-Self Discovery Ability

We often sacrifice today for tomorrow, connecting the present only to distant goals. But perhaps there’s another way. Imagine not just the future you’re working towards, but the future that may surprise you. Maybe today’s small choice—to pause, to listen, to dare—links to a tomorrow you couldn’t have planned.

This ability is about asking: “What am I learning about myself right now?” Not, “How will this make me better later?” but “What does this moment reveal about who I am?” When you cross the threshold out of your comfort zone, you don’t do it to become someone else. You do it to meet the parts of yourself you didn’t know were there.

Can you sit with discomfort and notice what it teaches you about your limits? Can you experience joy and let it show you what matters? Can you face a test and discover resources within yourself that you’d forgotten, or never knew existed?

This is the difference between living for a goal and living for discovery. One asks, “What will this get me?” The other asks, “What will this show me?”

3: Your Hinderance-Dealing Ability

Life’s hammers strike us often when we least expect them. Most advice says to push through, to visualize triumph, to overcome. But what if each hinderance is not merely a barrier, but a teacher? A mirror that reveals resilience, tenderness, or creativity you didn’t know you had.

Hinderances aren’t just external. They’re also internal: your fears, your doubts, your resistance, your impatience. The parts of yourself you’d rather not acknowledge, or the tough times you try to deny or hide.

Your hinderance-dealing ability isn’t about planning around problems while staying motivated. It’s about leaning into them with curiosity. It’s not bulldozing; it’s wondering what this is teaching you. It’s recognizing that hinderances are where you grow, where you discover capacities that you didn’t know you possessed.

Our biggest test isn’t about winning or succeeding. It’s about facing yourself fully and emerging changed. What are you avoiding? What makes you uncomfortable? What challenges keep appearing in different forms? These aren’t hinderances to your quest. These are your quests.

Whether you’re setting out for the first time or beginning again after many roads, the quest keeps reshaping you. At twenty, discovery might mean daring to start. At sixty, it might mean daring to change. Each encounter, each maybe, is an invitation to meet yourself anew.

The Magic of Maybes and Perhapses

The typical hero’s quest story is told as an epic of dragons and battles, friends and foes, crossing thresholds, times of silence and ordeals, and finally returning with some elixir or magical solution.

However, in its truest form, a quest is quieter, more personal. It’s the story of becoming. It’s where you leave behind the comfort of “I already know who I am.” It’s the place where the hammer strikes. Something breaks. But in the breaking, something new is revealed. It’s when you come back not with trophies, but with a self you hadn’t known before.

You may come to a place where there is no one else to tell you what to do, to a place of uncertainty.

What if, instead of demanding certainty, you embraced maybe? Maybe you will discover patience in the waiting. Maybe you will find courage not in slaying dragons but in sitting with fear. Maybe you will stumble upon joy where you least expected it. Maybe the path is leading you deeper into yourself.

Certainty is brittle. It shatters when life’s hammer comes down. But maybe is supple. It bends, reshapes, and carries you forward into your perhapses.

Your Quest Awaits

No one else can take this quest for you. But life, with all its beauty and brutality, its hammers and its wonders, is waiting for you to walk it.

And when life’s hammers fall, as they inevitably will, whatever you find on your journey, whether it’s a softer voice inside, a spark of creativity, or an unbreakable thread of resilience, will not make the hammers vanish but give you a strength they cannot destroy.

This is not a sermon, not a set of instructions. It is a gentle tap on your shoulder. A reminder that treasures are still hidden in the folds of your everyday.

May you go, then, into your maybes.

May you wander into your perhapses.

And may you return—not with answers, but with wonder.

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