Living a good life
As I pick up my ballpoint pen (I initially wrote this in a notebook, by hand), I instantly notice: hesitation, judgment, the sense of a vast gulf — infinite possibility — spreading before me. It feels like a paralytic agent has been injected into my veins, my body sitting motionless with me locked inside. And yet, somehow, I manage to touch my pen to paper. From there, I start writing a letter, a word, a sentence.
This is part of living a good life: moving, doing, noticing, resisting for the purpose of things that matter. It’s a process and a practice, things we must keep doing over and over again. It’s one of life’s hardest struggles, and it’s the source of our agency. It’s incredibly freeing to accept that there is no destination — it’s just about doing.
How do we know what a good life is? Everyone’s good life is their own good life. We tend to be pretty good at noticing the negatives — bad things, painful feelings, memories we don’t want to repeat. Sometimes, we can also recognize the good things — achieving an important milestone, enjoying time with a loved one, nostalgia for special past moments. But we’re wired to skip past the stuff we don’t need (or that our nervous systems think we don’t need) for survival. Ironically, even labeling stuff as “good” or “bad” can make it harder to access more of what we want. We’ve fine-tuned our threat detection systems so well that it can override the parts of us that want to rest, savor, and thrive. Increasing contact with those parts is how we start to figure out what our good life is — and to live it.
I’ll admit, it’s easier said than done to increase contact with these “non-essential” parts of ourselves and to figure out what our good life is. But we can start small: noticing our thoughts, emotions, body sensations; allowing a diversity of internal experiences (pleasurable, neutral, and painful); and recognizing the invaluable data that these internal experiences bring us about what’s happening around us, what we need, and what matters to us. Once we can figure those out, we can come up with choices for how we might act. Some of those choices will be limned with a glow that lets us know it’s connected to our values — the qualities we want to infuse into ourselves and our lives. These are the choices we want to make, even if (and perhaps especially when) they’re uncomfortable.
Which brings us back to my own process of writing this blog post. Writing is important to me; it feels like an old friendship I’ve let lapse. The notebook I used to write by hand has a quote from Louisa May Alcott on the cover: it says, “I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.” I’m committing to practicing, learning, and doing.
