For much of my life, I was very good at doing what I thought I was supposed to do.
I worked hard. I took responsibility. I tried to be good and dependable. I wanted to succeed, to be loved and to be thought well of. Like so many of us, I absorbed ideas about what a successful life was supposed to look like long before I stopped to ask whether those ideas were mine.
We are taught to prepare for life almost from the moment we begin living it. Study hard. Get a good job. Become successful. Find the right person. Achieve the next goal.
There is always somewhere else to get to.
And while we are busy getting there, our life is happening, and we are missing it.
Over the years, through my work, relationships, mistakes, successes, spiritual practice and the many times life refused to follow my plans, I have developed my own philosophy about what makes a life worth living.
I call it The Art of Living.
For me, the Art of Living is a conscious, embodied way of meeting life. It is about being present enough to experience your life, accepting it as it is, trusting yourself enough to live according to your own standards, and giving yourself the freedom to enjoy being alive.
Three ideas sit at the heart of it.
Be here. Be wild. Be you.
Be here.
Most of us spend an astonishing amount of time somewhere other than where we are.
We replay conversations. We analyse what somebody meant. We worry about what might happen. We think about what we need to do tomorrow while eating dinner tonight.
I know overthinking all too well. I spent years living predominantly in my head.
Presence taught me another way to live.
When you are present, you can actually experience what is happening. You can taste your food instead of eating while thinking about something else. You can listen to someone instead of preparing your answer. You can notice the sea, the sky, the music, the person sitting opposite you. You can notice how you feel.
Our lives may be marked by the big events, but they are lived in these simple, everyday moments. And yet we spend so much time waiting. Waiting to be happy somewhere in the future.
Waiting for the weekend. The vacation. The promotion. The relationship. More money. More time. The moment when everything finally falls into place, and we can relax, enjoy ourselves and live happily ever after.
There will always be another destination.
Joy is available in the life that is happening now.
Have dreams. Make plans. Want more. Just remember to experience and enjoy your life while you create it.
This is your life. Live it now.
Be wild.
Wildness, to me, has very little to do with recklessness.
Being wild means being fully alive.
Being curious. Exploring. Playing. Trying something because you wonder what it might be like. Travelling somewhere new. Dancing. Laughing. Enjoying wonderful food. Having great sex. Resting when you feel like it. Doing something simply because it gives you pleasure.
I often think about the phrase "guilty pleasure."
Why should pleasure come with guilt?
Life is meant to be experienced and enjoyed.
For me, life is a learning playground. And I think children understand this instinctively.
Watch a child learning to walk. They fall down and get back up. They fall again and try again. They don't wonder whether they are good enough at walking or decide after the fifth attempt that perhaps walking isn't for them. They keep going.
Children explore. They experiment. They are curious. They learn by doing.
Somewhere along the way, we become more concerned with getting things right. We worry about making mistakes, looking foolish or what other people will think. We judge ourselves when something doesn't work out.
I have made plenty of mistakes in my life and choices I would make differently today. I regret none of them. Every experience taught me something and contributed to the person I am today.
What if we gave ourselves more freedom to approach life like a playground again? To try. To explore. To enjoy. To get things wrong. To learn. To change our minds. To discover something we never knew about ourselves.
We cannot know where every choice will lead us.
And perhaps that's part of the fun.
Be curious. Be adventurous. Be wild.
Be you.
From an early age, we learn what is expected of us.
What success looks like. What kind of career we should have. How relationships should work. How we should behave. What we should have achieved by a certain age. What makes us good, respectable or worthy of approval.
Before long, it can become difficult to tell the difference between what we actually want and what we have learned to want.
I know this pattern well. For years, I adapted to what I thought was expected of me. I was the good girl, the responsible one, the capable one. I became very good at being who I thought I should be. Eventually, I learned to ask myself a simple question:
Who wants this?
Do I want this? Or do I think I should want it?
It is a question you can ask about almost anything. Your work. Your relationships. Your ambitions. The way you spend your time. Your definition of success.
To answer it, you have to know yourself. And you have to trust yourself.
Pay attention to what you think, feel, need, value and want. Give yourself permission to change your mind. You can outgrow a career, a relationship, a belief or a dream. You can discover something new about yourself at any age.
And then comes perhaps the harder part: having the courage to express who you are.
Your needs. Your opinions. Your desires. Your sexuality. Your ambitions. Your contradictions. Your sense of humour. Your way of dressing. The work you want to do. The relationships you want to have. The way you want to live. As long as you are not harming another living being, your life is yours to live.
Other people will have opinions. They get to have their opinions. You get to have your life.
Trust yourself. Be yourself. Be you.
Create a life you don't need a vacation from.
This is what the Art of Living ultimately means to me.
I love vacations. I love travelling, discovering new places and having adventures. But I don't want to need a vacation from my life.
For me, creating a life you don't need a vacation from means creating a daily life that you enjoy living. A life you have consciously created around what you want. A life where you wake up every day looking forward to the day ahead.
That doesn't mean every day will be wonderful. Even the best vacation isn't wonderful every minute. Flights get delayed. It rains. Plans go wrong. You get tired. You argue. You get lost. That's part of the adventure.
Life is like that too. There will be joy and disappointment, success and failure, love and loss, excitement and boredom. A fulfilling life includes all of it. The difference is that you aren't spending your days waiting to escape them.
You are present in your life. You are curious enough to experience it, play with it and see where it takes you. And you are living in a way that reflects who you are and what matters to you.
Be here. Be wild. Be you.
That's the Art of Living.
And when I eventually reach the end of my life, I want to look back without regret. I want to remember the things that worked and the things that went spectacularly wrong. The people I loved. The mistakes I made. The adventures I had.
I want to smile.
I want to laugh.
And I want to know:
I lived it.