Live Your Best Life Today

Living your best life means different things to different people. To some people, it’s about visiting the most exciting places, meeting new people, tasting new food, and experiencing new cultures.

To some, it’s about being successful in their careers, making a lot of money, and amassing a fortune. Then to others, it’s more about developing and maintaining relationships, whatever form they may take.

Of course, people likely want a combination of these things. The point is that at the end of the day, what constitutes your best life is defined by you alone.

But as subjective as the topic is, there is an underlying objective factor; fulfillment. I use the term fulfillment rather than happiness. Happiness is a weak and fleeting emotion that usually buries us deeper into a ditch of our own making the more we chase after it. Fulfillment, on the other hand, goes beyond the mere feeling of happiness.

I can easily tell you to do what makes you happy if you want to live your best life. But quite frankly, that will be a load of decomposed garbage. Off the top of my head, I can list four thousand things that may bring you happiness right now but cause you untold misery in the long run.

*Cough* Cocaine *Cough* And three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine more things.

Instead of seeking happiness, aspire to be fulfilled. The Collins dictionary defines fulfillment as a feeling of satisfaction you get from doing or achieving something, especially something useful.

Your first step towards living your best life is finding your calling in life; that which makes you feel useful while giving you a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness.

What are you passionate about? What do you love doing and wouldn’t mind doing no matter how hard it gets? For me, that will be writing. I love to write stories, create worlds, and bring characters to life.

As someone who’s somehow managed to finish three books (don’t ask me about the quality of those books), I can say with absolute certainty that writing a book is as monumental a task as building a pyramid. Have I built a pyramid before? No. So how do I know this? I was a Pharaoh in my last life. Sue me.

Seriously though, any writer will tell you how hard it is to write a book. Even short stories, which are by definition short, are by no means short of their fair share of challenges.

There have been times I get to the middle of writing a manuscript and I suddenly think I’m the biggest fraud in the Milky Way. Sometimes, I want to hurl my computer across the room and smash my head into a wall of granite. Why? Because all I’m writing is nothing but metropolitan waste. None of these things makes me happy, so why do I keep writing? That’s easy to answer.

Writing fulfills me.

In the short term, it makes me irritable, excited, sad, exhausted, happy, and a myriad of emotions, many of which the very limited vocabulary of spoken language can barely begin to encapsulate.

In the long term, however, I feel the greatest sense of accomplishment when I finish a book. I feel amazing, euphoric, high even. This is the one thing I know how to do and I’ll be damned if I can’t do it anymore. That’s my biggest fear in life; not being able to write anymore.

You know something fulfills you when your biggest fear is that you will never be able to do it again or have it anymore. It’s a nightmare, and in my case, it almost became real. Too real.

As I write this, my left eye has a serious problem, making it nearly impossible to open it. The dimmest light feels like the goddamn sun on my face, and if migraines were earthquakes, mine would break the Richter Scale.

During my last (and first) eye examination, my left eye couldn’t read past the fourth line on the eye chart while my right eye went way past the sixth line. The fate of my left eye got me fearing the worst. Was I going blind? Will I never be able to read or write again? What’s going to happen to my everyday life?

Fortunately, the doctor said I’d be fine. Unfortunately, that does nothing to allay my fears.

This has prompted me to take a critical look at my life. I asked myself, assuming I lose my sight today, what’s going to be my biggest regret? What’s the one thing I’ll regret not doing? It will be that I never took my writing seriously for a long time.

I would often procrastinate, busily doing everything but writing when I knew damn well I should be writing. Those were not the proudest moments of my life. But I guess I had to go through that to get to where I am today. On the other hand, if there’s something I’ll never regret, then it’s that I finally learned how much being a writer meant to me.

I learned to discipline myself into treating my writing time and space like the sacred entities they were. And oh, I finished a book. Three, actually. It’s something I’ll always be proud of even if I haven’t published anything yet.

So right now, I ask, are you doing what fulfills you? Or are you channeling your energy to the things that give you happiness in the short term only to make you miserable in the long term?

What do you need to achieve in life? It doesn’t matter how big or small it is as long as it’s important to you. Do you have to improve your relationship with your family, friends, or partner? Do it now.

Do you want to write, sing, learn an instrument, paint, or do anything you’re passionate about? Don’t wait, start now. Do you want a better, more fulfilling job? What’s stopping you from getting it?

I understand how difficult it can be to achieve the things we want. Well, that’s what life is all about and we have to live it anyway. Why? Because one minute you’re doing nothing worthwhile, though equipped with everything you need — a brain, eyes, limbs, money, anything valuable you possess — and the next minute, you have nothing.

Life simply snatches everything away from you.

Don’t wait till you have nothing. Live your best life now while you still can.

Thanks for reading.

Originally published at https://torshietorto.com on July 8, 2022.