Living Your Life
“ …I have my phone pressed hot against my ear. Chelsea and I are trying to talk, but there is too much to say.
“I think I’m running out of time, honey,” I say finally. “I’m not trying to be dramatic, but here’s what I worry about: What if you are too?” She knows what I am saying. She is working harder than anyone I have ever known, but her selflessness has caused her to surrender too much of herself to ‘someday’. And now someday has come, at least for me.
Whenever I have fallen apart she has reassembled the pieces. I know she wants to reach through the phone and pull me back into our bubble, where one of us cries and the other diagnoses the problem with merciless affection.
“I have to go,” I say finally. “I’ve got to adjust my meds.” But we just sit there, clinging to goodbye, before I say at last: “Go live your life, Chels.”
All these words I am tripping over are benedictions. Live unburdened. Live free. Live without forevers that don’t always come. These are my best hopes for you, that you press forward at last. I don’t know how to die, but I know how to press this crushing grief into hope, hope for them. It doesn’t sound like goodbye. It sounds more like this: Fare thee well, my loves.”
I don’t want to miss out on my life. I don’t want to count on a someday that never comes. There is too much that holds us back from living. We get so distracted by to do lists, meaningless tasks that consume our lives. We get caught up in the pursuit of an end game, a goal, a place that feels like stability and safety and lose what could unfold in a day. Each day has the potential for joy. But we delay our enjoyment until someday. It is so common to think that weekdays are for work and weekends are for enjoyment. It is so common to think that if we put in the work now, that we will get to have fun later. But as Kate Bowler points out, that day might never come. Personally, I am not willing to take that risk.
Workaholism is the most widespread illness in my country. Wake up, drop the kids at school, spend the day working, pick up the kids, serve dinner, put the kids to bed, watch Netflix, collapse. Rinse and repeat. We call this a life. Where is the living? We are zombies that shuffle back and forth from home to work with little in between. Where is the life? Why have kids if you don’t get to know them, get to enjoy them? Why have a home if you’re never there? Why have a job that doesn’t fulfill you?
The United States has the least paid leave days and the second least paid vacation days in the world. That is astonishing to me. Out of totalitarian countries, out of dictatorships, out of countries with forced labor, child labor, the United States is dead last. We have an illness and addiction and a strange cultural mentality that work is all that exists. Why is no one allowed to take a break, to rest? Why is no one allowed to enjoy their life, their money earned? If we work so hard to earn, why not get to have time to enjoy what we have earned? It has gotten to the point that colleagues have to ‘donate’ their leave days to each other in order to have surgery, to attend to a sick child, to attend a once in a lifetime event. This has become normal. It baffles me. Why can’t the employer just grant more leave?
At any dinner party, any social gathering, I’ve even been to in the United States, I have always been asked ‘What do you do?’ as the first question upon meeting someone. I never understood this. Especially because I have always had jobs that I felt ill defined me. I never once identified with my job as who I am as a person. I never have liked leading with a title to say something about who I am. No title has ever really said much about who I am.
“Everybody’s working for the weekend… Everybody’s goin’ off the deep end”
We are lost in work, we are lost in goals, we are lost in trying to earn enough to survive. In that maze we have lost what matters most. Everything that makes us human – our capacity for joy, wonder, and love.
When my first nephew was born, it was the closest, most front row seat I got to have to watch a human arrive into the world. From seemingly nothing and nowhere there was a baby, a whole other human that never existed before. I got to hold him when he was two hours old. I watched his infancy as he discovered the world. First, he found out he had hands. Then he found those hands could grab things in this world. I watched his exploration as every new object entered into his newborn bubble. I was as spellbound by him as he was spellbound by each discovery he made. I looked around at the people in our family, the people around us. They were oh so busy. And I felt like screaming, ‘Do you see this? Do you see this miracle right here? This human who just showed up out of nothing is discovering what it means to be in a human body and interact with the world. You are missing it! You are missing it! How can you just go about life as normal?”
This is just my personal example of what I marvel at. What makes me stop and go wow. Not everyone is entranced by the development of a child. But there is something that entrances each of us. Something that makes us stop, our stomachs turn, and the world tilt on its axis. Suddenly, the world is different. It could be the development of a plant in a garden or the construction of a building, a beloved family pet perhaps. Each of us has the capacity for wonder. For awe. We don’t use that in our lives. We are missing it.
The checklist of what makes up a life goes something like this: after you are born, go to preschool, then kindergarten, go to school, to high school, to college, get a job, get married, have a baby, have two, buy a house, retire, and maybe then you might get to enjoy your life.
What I want for my life. What I want for all of us. What I want in my life is delight. I want to be surprised and delighted. I want joy. Laughter. Enjoyment. I want to act from a place of love. To let every decision I make be led from my heart and not my brain.
Leading with my heart has led me to places I never expected to be. But I can say truthfully that every logical decision I have ever made has made me unhappy and every heart led decision I have ever made has made me happy.
Living this way takes practice. It takes time to learn to hear your heart and learn what it is trying to tell you. It takes time to have faith in your heart. To shut out all the outside voices. To shut out the shoulds and have to’s. And to become intimately familiar with one’s one inner direction.
Choosing this way of living is terrifying. It comes with a healthy dose of fear. Because there is no logic under it. There is no security net. There is just faith. Faith that my heart will lead me in the right direction. So far it has.
Let me be clear. I am well aware that not everyone has the privilege and ability to get out of survival mode to live a heart led life. There are so many, too many, who have to work to survive. I wish for many things in this world, in this country. But what I cannot seem to fathom, in this country, one of the wealthiest in the world, we cannot afford somehow for everyone to have a living wage and time off to enjoy their wages? In a country with this much wealth, we cannot afford to take a break?
“I will not die an unlived life
I will not live in fear
of falling or catching fire.
I choose to inhabit my days,
to allow my living to open me,
to make me less afraid,
more accessible,
to loosen my heart
until it becomes a wing,
a torch, a promise.
I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.”