Absolute, ravishing appreciation for the sheer wonder of living.
It is said that if we have the opportunity to look back from the summit of our lives, we will see unfurled a lifelong quest for meaning, purpose, and belonging. Some look most earnestly for meaning, peering under rocks, thumbing pages, enquiring of the ancients, and traveling to all points of the compass. The tools they employ in the hunt, their curiosity, their eyes, hands, openness of mind, persistence, and vitality are not solely for seeking answers on how and why you are supposed to live, these very tools can be redirected to actually getting on with it – living. The experience of being alive, fully alive is what is truly transcendent, and the ultimate goal of the quest.
At the speed of time, our past expands, our future, diminishes. It is in the region between, the present, that we either risk being alive by opening to the idiosyncratic individual we are born to be, or we don’t.
The final words of too many are “I wish I had lived the life I wanted”. In the place of knowing who and what they could have been, is a yellowing page of performed duties and met expectations. Mostly others, expectations!
Purpose meaning and belonging are syncopated with being yourself. Our uniqueness is our piece of humanity’s jigsaw, our gift, and contribution. What holds so many back is fear and risk. Risk of better options, risk of being exposed as an amateur, the risk of ridicule, the risk of not being enough, of being unloved, hurt, and feeling unappreciated, these fears imprison. Yet the bars have no more substance than smoke. They are only ideas – comfortable thought hammocks that cradle and soothe us with our accumulation of self-lies and little fears. Yet they loom so large in our minds we think great courage is required to break free, where tiny baby steps will do just fine. Gathering all our resolve, huffing up muscle and bluster, is unnecessary, just a little momentum, works best. If the journey to ourselves starts out as terribly humanly messy and imperfect – great, you are getting warm.
Perfectionism is the greatest enemy of creativity it is also the greatest enemy of yourself. Allow imperfections – don’t try to make the imperfect perfect – strive instead to make the imperfections beautiful. Do that and somewhere along the way things turn about and meaning, purpose and belonging begin seeking you.
