How You Live vs What You Live
Connecting to the qualities we want to experience, instead of the boxes we want to check
Dear soul,
Work hard, exercise, eat healthy, sleep well, keep learning new skills, be with friends and family, don’t use plastic. If we allow it, society will eat up our lives with its endless external demands.
On top of that, we all have multiple personal desires: to have a nice home, more free time, more time in nature, learn to tango, go to Patagonia.
If we pay attention to these lists we make, they are a bunch of “what’s”: things, actions, activities. Yet, they don’t carry many “how’s”. In other words,
we focus much on what we want in life, but not so much on how we want life to be.
I might love biking and go for a daily ride, but that doesn’t mean I rejoice in it every time. Meaning that, even though I am doing something I love, I am not always getting fulfilled. I might be in a rush, my mind might be somewhere else, and, just like that, what I love becomes just something I do, another box to be checked.
How do you want to live your life, meaning, what are the qualities that you want your life to be permeated with?
It can be patience, kindness, connection, love, respect, pleasure, humor, ease, you name it. These are all qualities we can bring to anything in our lives. Nothing from the outside can bring these to us in a sustainable manner; we have to nurture them ourselves.
Bringing the how to the what
I can work on something serious and well-structured, but how I do it is up to me: can I bring agency, presence, and meaning to it? Can I grocery shop with a pinch of joy and relaxation?
The point of values and virtues is to live them: to embody them, and therefore be them. To use them as our north in our decision-making and action-taking. It’s about our awareness of our mood, and how we can shift with the power of attention. And just like that we can cultivate a specific energy, like compassion, and live from that place.
So many people live serious, rigid lives and long for lightness and relaxation. Well, no one said this or that has to be done in a certain way. It’s up to us to lighten up and see different ways of doing the same thing. It’s up to us to watch (and change) our inner dialogue.
I will never forget when I was setting an altar for an event with a friend, and we were running against the clock. As I started working in a frenzy, trying to make it on time, my friend looked at me and said, with the softest voice and eyes: “Why are you so rushed? We are doing something sacred. Slow down, bring your heart back in here in devotion”. His remark always comes back when I feel I am rushing through life: the point is to be here, fully, with my heart present — and not trying to get it done with.
Practice
Here is an exercise to increase our awareness of where we are living from:
Step 1: What are your core values, the main qualities you would like to infuse your life with? Pause for a second and write them down.
Step 2: Now list the things you have done in the last three days. Everything. From grocery shopping to working, including meeting friends, and resting listening to your favorite record.
Step 3: Time to connect the two lists. Go item by item from Step 2 and ask yourself: how did you do this thing, what were you experiencing as you doing it? Was any of the qualities you listed present?
Connect the two lists but please, be honest with yourself. Don’t force-connect every action to a value; see what fits in naturally. If an activity is not connected to any of the qualities you listed naturally, the point is to reflect: can you bring a different energy to this activity and thereby change how you experience your life? Or, should you just do less of this thing?
Step 4: Are any of your values represented in the list in Step 1 not being brought into your life? If the answer is yes, what can you do to bring that into alignment?
There’s a great gap between what we tell ourselves and how we act. The idea is to reduce the gap between these two, to live in alignment. At the end of the day, a well-lived life is what matters, and we do that consciously by living from within.
Good thing we can always be kind to ourselves and fine-tune our lives at any given moment.
See you next week,
Aline