What are the ingredients of a ‘good life‘?
Is it money? An important job? A beautiful house? Leisure time? These metrics seem to be at the receiving end of our obsessive focus, leading us astray without us either realising or wanting to acknowledge it. Work contributes to our anxiety and pressure and the fall back of our free time is immersed in a backyard called blue screens.
“If we really want to live, we’d better start at once to try..if we don’t, it doesn’t matter, but we’d better start to die”- W. H Auden
The choice is simple. Between now and the end of our lives we can choose either to live or to die. Biological life is an automatic process, as long as we take care of the needs of the body. But to live in the sense that poet Auden refers to above is not something that will happen by itself. In fact, everything conspires against it. If we don’t take charge of its direction, our life will be controlled by the outside which will ensure that we are marching to a different beat, nothing of which is our own. Biologically programmed instincts will use it to replace the genetic material we carry, the culture will ensure that we will propagate its values and institutions and other people will use as much of our energy to further their own agenda- with no compunction on how all these would affect us. We cannot expect anyone to help us live. We must discover how to do it ourselves.
‘To live‘ is NOT just biological survival. It must mean to live in fullness, without waste of time and potential, expressing one’s own uniqueness, yet participating intimately in the complexity of the cosmos.
Life will mean what we experience from morning to night, seven days a week, for about seventy years if we are lucky or more if we are very fortunate. So, the best strategy is to assume that these seventy odd years are our best chance to experience the cosmos and that we should make the fullest use of it. For, if we don’t, we might lose everything; whereas if we are wrong and there is life beyond the grave, we lose nothing.
Finding flow will be at the sweet spot where one is not restrained by the accident called ‘birth’ and the accompanying allies in the script called gender, social hierarchies.
As James Clear puts it “Life is harder when you expect a lot of the world and little of yourself. Life is easier when you expect a lot of yourself and little of the world “.
Ready to engage with everyday life?
ENDS