The path does not announce itself.
It never did.
When I was younger, I believed direction arrived with urgency. If something mattered, it felt loud. I trusted momentum because it looked like evidence. That belief lasted until it failed me. Most beliefs do.
The path is quieter than that. It appears after enough repetition to recognize what does not hold. It shows itself when the same mistake stops feeling surprising. By then, the noise has usually thinned.
People often ask how to know when they are off course. The answer is simpler than they expect. You know when correction feels like an inconvenience instead of a relief. Resistance is rarely confusion. It is attachment.
Correction is not punishment. It is information. Early in life, I treated it like an insult. That habit did not last. What corrected me most was not failure, but fatigue. I grew tired of maintaining what never fit.
Stillness came later. Not as a practice, but as a necessity. The body will eventually demand what the mind avoids. Pausing was not about peace. It was about noticing drift before it became distance.
The path does not reward enthusiasm. It responds to attention. Attention shows up in small ways. What you return to. What you repair. What you stop explaining. Over time, those choices narrow the field. Not everything remains possible. That is not loss. That is orientation.
I have watched people abandon good paths because they mistook consistency for stagnation. They wanted proof that something was happening. Proof is overrated. What matters is whether the ground still holds.
You stay on a path by maintaining it. You clear what accumulates. You adjust what shifts. You accept that some stretches will never feel new again. Familiarity is not failure. It is what allows you to continue when novelty runs out.
The path does not care what you believe about it.
It responds to what you do, repeatedly, when no one is watching.
That has always been enough.
