I want to live the way I want to live.
I guess we all do,
Don't we?
But do we?
I don't want to live the way I default to.
Not the way I end up living when I'm distracted,
Rushed or half-present.
I want to live the way I choose to live.
Yet something keeps pulling me away.
Something subtle and familiar.
A thought,
A worry,
A sense that I should be elsewhere,
Doing more,
Fixing something,
Becoming someone slightly different from who I am right now.
It draws me out of the moment before I even realise what's happened.
I imagine intentional living as setting sails,
Choosing a direction,
Feeling the wind,
Letting the journey itself be beautiful,
Not just the destination.
Not bracing myself through life,
But fully inhabiting it.
I want to feel my way forward,
Fully alive,
Responsive and present.
And every so often,
There are moments where this happens naturally.
There are moments when life meets us without effort.
There's something unmistakable in the air then,
An invisible presence.
A kind of quiet electricity,
Not loud or dramatic,
Just spacious.
As if the world has more room in it all of a sudden.
In these moments,
Everything feels included.
How could we ever be lonely here?
When the trees are meeting us.
When the sounds of the world are arriving exactly as they are.
When breath is happening.
When life is unfolding without asking us to manage it.
Absence suddenly feels very far away.
Nothing is missing,
There is only this,
And this is astonishing.
And I don't mean astonishing in a poetic sense,
I mean literally,
Filled with awe.
This is how we are meant to live,
Surely.
Presence has weight,
It has texture,
It carries us.
It's here when dark clouds break open in to rain.
It's here when soft light fills the room without announcement.
And it doesn't discriminate between pleasant and unpleasant.
It simply arrives.
Drawn deeper into it,
Even the harsh sounds belong.
The squawk of a crow.
The rumble of a distant lorry.
The slamming of a neighbour's door.
It all belongs.
Nothing needs to be edited out for this moment to be complete.
Everything finds its place in the music of now.
And when I'm really here,
Even briefly,
There is a quiet recognition.
Ah,
This.
As it is.
My life.
Not the imagined one.
Not that perfected dream.
This one.
Here.
Now.
And in that seeing,
There's a surprising sense of peace.
Not because everything is ideal.
But because nothing is rejected.
This is what intentional living points towards.
It's not about control or even constant mindfulness.
But a willingness to show up for what's actually happening.
Again and again.
Maybe even as if we have chosen it.
And we quite possibly have.
Tomorrow,
We'll look at one of the main forces that pulls us away from this.
And it does so quite often without us even noticing.
The mind's tendency to scan for what's wrong.
What's missing.
Where the threat is.
Tomorrow,
We'll speak about the negativity bias.
See you then.
