Anna on Twitter asks, “Is anyone else really stressed about their future and where they are in life and what they’ve accomplished and their worth as a person?”
I understand what you’re saying, but that’s mostly just head noise that gets indoctrinated into us by the unhealthy society we live in.
Life isn’t about racking up a bunch of accomplishments or hitting certain milestones, it’s about living. Literally physically being alive, and making sure you fully live it.
When I say “fully live” your life, I don’t mean having a bunch of exciting experiences like going skydiving or running with the bulls, and I don’t mean ticking a bunch of boxes like getting married and having kids. I mean actually being present for it. Having your attention in what’s really going on instead of in a bunch of made-up thought fluff in your head. And that actually gets a lot easier to do once you let go of the notion that you’re doing life wrong and that your story isn’t unfolding correctly.
According to the rules of our dysfunctional society, you are inadequate unless you’ve become a productive gear-turner for capitalism and obtained enough wealth to consume products at large volume. Ideally you’ll have also produced some children who can grow up to become good consumers and gear-turners themselves. Your life is nothing but a story of academic goals to career goals to relationship goals to family goals, purchasing larger and larger chunks of real estate along the way until you catch some disease and die.
Your enjoyment of life? Worthless. Your relishing of your own sensory experiences from moment to moment upon this unfathomably beautiful planet? Entirely without value. Marveling about the miraculous nature of this strange and wonderful terrestrial experience? Irrelevant. All that matters in this civilization is what boxes you have ticked and what products you have purchased.
This is an insane way to live. Only the human brain could come up with such spectacular hallucinations.
Only humans are crazy enough to believe life is going wrong even when they’ve got a beating heart, a full belly, and no physical threats in the immediate vicinity. No frog is sitting there worrying about its worth as a frog. No eagle is flooding its body with stress hormones because it hasn’t accomplished enough in life. They get their food and they relax. That’s their whole day.
How to live? The cells in your body already know how to live. Your mind has no idea, but your cells know. All your mind can do is make stuff up about what a life well-lived looks like, and meanwhile your living cells are already doing life without your mind’s supervision or understanding. They’re doing it in your sleep, that’s how irrelevant your mind is to the process of living. Your mind thinks it’s driving this life, but it’s actually just a loud and bratty passenger.
When you stop listening to the mind barking instructions from the back seat and learn to simply sit in the wonder of sensory experience like the animals do, that’s when you really start living. When you stop listening to the babbling mental monologue and the labeling, dividing mind which thinks it knows what everything is, you start seeing everything for the first time. Each moment of this incarnation is fascinating and awe-inspiring when you learn to see it with fresh eyes, whether you’re climbing Mount Everest or sitting at home drinking coffee.
That’s what living is really about. It’s about truly showing up for your one precious life. Not the story of your life. Not other people’s ideas about your life. Not your arguments with life or your assumptions about what it should look like. Your actual life, as it’s actually appearing, in the here and now, from moment to moment.
Don’t let the madness of our dystopian society trick you into missing out on this. Don’t take your guidance on how to live your life from a profoundly sick civilization.
Take your guidance instead from your own living cells. From your senses. From the felt experience of the living body. From the air in your lungs. From the colors and shades in your visual field. From the vibrations in your eardrums. From the wind on your skin and in your hair.
That’s the only place life is actually happening. Start there. Start there over and over again. Every instant is a brand new beginning.
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This is really important. Just be. Look around and there's an entire world in the small spaces around you. You don't need certificates or trophies or awards. You don't need to be famous. The world is full of anonymous people who do not stand out in any way to the rest of the world. But they were here on planet Earth and made their mark just by existing. You are a miracle. Every person is a miracle. Take it all in.
"The cells in your body already know how to live."
No truer words. Each one an amazing complex adaptive system. And then they collaborate.