Art of Living 1
I saw a video the other day where the host offered a hypothetical ten million dollars to someone.
“Yes, of course I’d take it.”
“What if you could have the ten million but you wouldn’t wake up tomorrow?”
And there’s the rub.
It’s so easy to get disconnected from the beauty, miracle and vibrance of life. So easy to get distracted by work, achievement, or hyperfocus on what’s not going right.
When really it’s holy sh*t…we’re alive.
We breathe and move and love. We’re surrounded by amazing people. We go places…wonderful, interesting places. We eat such food. Our hearts beat and pray. Our hands hold and make.
Personal development is about being able to consistently connect with this truth:
The way we live is intimately linked to the way we die.
The dreams we’re chasing are hollow if we can’t share them. They’re hollow if we can’t be present with the reason we’re chasing them in the first place. It’s not just to get validation, approval and acceptance from the world. It’s to wear the fabric of our own greatness.
By art of living, I mean dancing with everything. I mean letting life work on us and through us. I mean being curious. I mean we have a presence that has an impact on the world around us, an imprint, a ripple, a tune.
Life can be a canvas we add paint to. Blue, green, yellow, a splash of magenta. It can be a boulder we chip at, revealing the beauty underneath, like Michelangelo did for David. It can be like molding and shaping clay. They all have a place. They all have a specific way of engaging. We have access to all of these different lenses.
We can mold and shape our identities and experiences. We can orient ourselves deliberately. We can add color and vibrance and dimension. We can chip away at the details of ourselves, revealing something magnificent.
Larry Levis wrote: we are all details among other details and we long to be teased out of ourselves and become all of them.
It all adds up.
This is the hue: when we get to the end of our lives will we be amazed at how we showed up or haunted by what wasn’t?
When we understand life as art there’s no more trying to get it right, exact and perfect. There’s no more rigid. There’s an opening and an expansion, a feeling space that we can dwell in. It’s not just our mortality. It’s the day in day out appreciation.
It’s living with that lit up feeling.
It’s waking in the morning looking forward to coffee and a curiosity about what the day brings, recognizing that life is always full of surprise. Delight is a simple thing: a sunflower, a small stone from the driveway.
We are constantly weaving our tapestry and whether it’s jagged edges or smooth lines, the question is always: can we see beauty?
The point is to enjoy the ride and we’ve all heard that before but can we live it? Not perfectly, but to the best of our ability? Because if the choice is an exorbitant amount of money or the ability to live one more day, every single one of us knows what we’d say.
So let’s live like that today.
This moment.
This breath.
This decision.
This presence.
This existence.
This choice.
This love.
This gift.
This life.