Where is the life in me?
It’s a good question to ask yourself. We live our lives getting on with things we need to hardly noticing where the time goes. And in all this getting on with living, it really is good sometimes to stop, check in with yourself and ask ‘Where is the life in me?’
Sometimes we sense that things are off balance. I sense it when I get the feeling of being on autopilot. For me it’s a feeling of being disconnected. I might do a familiar walk from a familiar place at a familiar time and get there remembering absolutely nothing of the walk. Not the people I passed, the things I saw, the roads I crossed. Nothing. I must have done it all safely but I really wasn’t there.
The autopilot sensation can spread to vast areas of our lives - relationships with family, friends, colleagues; our work (paid and unpaid); every way we spend our time. Annie Dillard put it eloquently.
“As we live our days is, of course, how we spend our lives ”
If we are not noticing how we are living we aren’t noticing our lives. That seems such a waste of all our lovely potential.
Yes sometimes we might have to do things to meet other people’e expectations of us. Any job at any level can feel lacklustre - from the unpaid work we do in the home to everything right up to high level work in an organisation that might pay a lot and look prestigious but has lost personal meaning.
We might have to do some things to earn a living or meet responsibilities but we don’t have to collude with things that don’t have meaning. We can and must do them but we simply don’t have to pretend that they have meaning to us.
So what does have meaning?
The important thing is to find what is meaningful to you and make sure that you make space for it in your daily life. That’s where the life in you lives.
I just finished reading a wonderful book called The Salt Path by Raynor Winn. It’s the true story of a couple in their early 50s losing everything but finding their lives. They did it by walking and free camping over a 630 mile journey along the English South West coast. It wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was all they could think of after being made homeless and having very little money - barely enough to feed themselves on. Added to that was Raynor’s partner being diagnosed with a terminal illness. Their time was framed intensely by the 630 miles and by a diagnosis that could mean death in under a year. The book tells of the intensity of the walking life and the journey to meaning.
Ironically people Ray and her partner met along the path envied them their time. Fellow walkers guessed they must have so much time and so many resources to be able to give it all up for months to walk and camp. The opposite, of course, was true.
Not all of them, but certainly some of the walkers they met, were people meeting targets. Everything was about getting somewhere by a particular time, at a particular pace, to achieve a particular goal. Or even just ticking off experiences. Life on a list. Author Marilynne Robinson wrote a book of essays called The Givenness of Things. She observes our cultural battle with time.
“The spirit of our times can appear to be one of joyless urgency.”
The joyless urgency is where the unobserved, autopilot life lurks. It can leave us exhausted, deflated, lifeless. For me I experience it as a feeling of being stuck or rooted in a state I don’t want to be.
The battle worth fighting is not the one with time stretching out into an unknowable future but the battle to pay attention to what gives us joy now. And when we get to know and understand what gives us joy keep noticing and understanding. Make space for those things and commit to them.
They don’t have to be monumental things and you don’t have to do something as drastic and challenging as a 630 mile free camping walk to find out what they are. You can just try experimenting and noticing.
Sessions 2 and 3 of Stoan Method are all about finding what makes you happy in the tiny details of your days and how you want to live. It can be surprisingly difficult to figure out what we want. The questions in Stoan Method and the way they are asked, open thinking up in a gentle way. Sometimes we see things more clearly spotting them out of the corner of our eye than looking at them head-on in a sort of headlight glare. It’s a gradual coming into focus with no pressure.
We don’t all have to do extraordinary things to live extraordinarily meaningful lives that touch deeply the people around us. Or indeed the things around us: animals, pets, our gardens, nature.
It is possible to find the life in you and the joy that comes along with it. It really makes no difference what the thing is. It’s the meaning that matters.
There’s more thinking about how we live in this piece from the brilliant Maria Popova’s Marginalian blog. I read her regularly and found this one again when I looked up the Annie Dillard quote to check I was remembering it properly.
If you’re feeling stuck or uninspired I hope this helps.