What Is Life?
What is life? | How do we live it? | How can we thrive? | And what does it mean to be alive?
“Everything is everything.” Donny Hathaway
In 1970 the ex-Beatle George Harrison released a triple album, ‘All Things Must Pass’ and one of the featured songs asked, ‘What Is Life?’ It was an uplifting, catchy piece with a great chorus, and it posed such a great question. One that now fifty-five years on is perhaps even more so in our crazy mixed-up world, where we must find a way to navigate, make sense and meaning, and try to be our true self.
Reality Check
“A spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.”
If you live to be 80 years old, you will have only lived 4,000 weeks. That’s a fact, and every day you live 86,400 seconds will pass and you will take 22,000 breaths. Two more facts about the life your living.
And don’t think this is something that is just happening to you as an adult. Figures suggest that the average three-year-old is already spending upwards of 4 hours a day on a screen. Whilst a child aged between 12 and 15 years will spend over 1092 minutes on their phone each week.
Starting now though I want you to STOP and “learn to sit in the mud”. That is to pause, take a deep breath and accept that sometimes you can’t fix everything, you just have to be in it and get through it. That you don’t have to know everything, or even need to know everything. Not everyone needs to think you are perfect or act the way you want them to, and the universe most definitely doesn’t have to give you what you think you want because your reality is not The Reality.
So, you will not let your thoughts define you, but you will henceforth be clear about what success means for you, set your goals accordingly (perhaps using the ‘Four L’s’ technique which you’ll find at the end of this piece*), and become the creator and curator of your life so you and not someone else will be the teller of your stories!
Do this and you will “Burn Bright, Not Out”.
Self-Healing
“We are all magicians without magic, with only our simple humanity to get us through.” Salman Rushdie
Aristotle introduced the concept of self-healing, but the term self-help itself dates to just 1859, when the Scottish reformer Samuel Smiles (yes, real person, real name) published his book which went on to be a contemporary best seller, simply called — ‘Self Help’.
In fact, it sold 20,000 copies in 1859, and over 250,000 copies by the time of his death five decades later.
And his thesis was a simple one. He argued that changing individual behaviour would be a far better remedy for all society’s ills than trying to legislate for it.
He wouldn’t recognise the world we are living in today of course, with its constant motion and commotion. The incessant chatter and noise. Twitter noise. Political noise. Noise at work. Noise at home.
Noise. Noise. Noise, and it’s exhausting and takes its toll both mentally and physically!
So, Where’s The Magic To Be Found?
I think that the 13th-century Persian Sunni Muslim poet Rumi hit the nail on the head when he wrote: “Love makes bitters sweet, copper gold, shadows vanish, death into life. From understanding comes love”.
On that basis then we’ve all got to understand and agree that we need to love as hard as we can and do it now!
Coupled with that we need to get with the programme and give as much as we can, which is not the same as not loving as hard as we can but more about what we hold onto and don’t give.
Whatever situation we’re in there will always be a part of us that we hold back, either deliberately, or not. Would you agree? Perhaps it’s to protect ourselves from feeling fully in the moment, because that makes us vulnerable and opens us up to uncomfortable feelings and the pain of loss.
Here’s the kicker though, loss is inevitable, and vulnerability is a superpower, although we tend to think about our own vulnerability in a concrete way, while thinking about others’ vulnerability more abstractly. This psychological phenomenon also known as ‘The Beautiful Mess Effect’ can mean we overestimate how harshly we will be judged when we reveal a weakness or failure, and underestimate how much people will appreciate our honesty or courage. In general, people’s perceptions of vulnerability are far more positive than we imagine.
In ‘The Power Of Vulnerability’, Dr Brene Brown’s first TED Talk in 2013 she said that vulnerability was the “birthplace of creativity and change.” She also described it as “the core, the heart and centre of meaningful human experiences”.
Whilst in her book, ‘Daring Greatly: How The Courage To Be Vulnerable Transforms The Way We Live, Love, Parent & Lead’, published the year before her first TED Talk, she defined vulnerability as “uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure.”
In short, raw vulnerability sounds an awful lot like truth, feels very much like courage, and can be our currency and our agency because –
“The radical openness of not knowing is a more adequate stance toward life and experience than believing or pretending to know.”
Is That All There Is?
If we never allow ourselves to feel completely and fully experience whatever we do in the moment we do it, we will always be asking ourselves, “Is that all there is?” and we will never be truly alive and true to ourselves.
Without fasting there can be no feasting. One direct and tangible experience must precede another, and I believe these words of Hunter S Thompson make the point –
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
And as he went on to say, “Buy the ticket and take the ride”.
So, don’t dwell in the past, because to live your life anchored to past events prevents you fully Being and Doing in the present, and the experience of the present moment is all we really have, as I explain in my book ‘Uncovering Mindfulness: In Search of a Life More Meaningful’.
Rumination, as defined by Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, the late Yale Professor of Psychology, is the compulsion to focus on what’s wrong, rather than what’s right. To focus on one’s distress and its causes, rather than its solutions.
It’s being stuck, continuously experiencing the negative stuff and it’s just so debilitating. Do you know what, from the brain’s point of view there’s no difference emotionally between experiencing the negative event and thinking about it and as William Shakespeare so aptly put it in Hamlet –
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. Well, then it isn’t one to you, since nothing is really good or bad in itself — it’s all what a person thinks about it.”
Take heed and pay due attention to the present moment experience. Be Mindful too, as you are being present and imagine all your thoughts whether to your mind good or bad are just coloured balloons — and let them go and fly, up, up, away!
And to the question ‘What Is Life?’, the answer is simply it’s something to be lived and all you have to do is love as hard as you must, give as much as you can to whatever you do, and don’t dwell in the past, or fixate on the future, just live in the present and enjoy the ride!
A Really Useful Wee Exercise
“Without a dream there is no reality” [Tweet This]
Here’s the ‘Four L’s’’* technique which you may find helpful when you sit down and review things before setting your goals this coming year. Use the four L’s as headings:
- What I Love e.g. When do I most feel alive? What makes me happy and what do I most enjoy?
- What I Long for e.g. What do I really want? What’s missing? What can’t I live without?
- What I Loathe e.g. What do I really hate? What do I feel is a total waste of time? &,
- What I’ve Learned e.g. What do I know? What don’t I know? What do I need to know?
Try it, it works!
And Finally
“For a long time, it had seemed to me that life was about to begin. Real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be gotten through first. Then life would begin. At last, it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.” Alfred D’Souza
So, invest in that ticket, take the ride, and enjoy what the ancients called the praemia vitae, or as you and I might say “The gifts of life”!
About The Author
“We need less math and more poetry.”
Having written over a million published words towards endings and beginnings and finding a brilliantly elegant simplicity that costs nothing, Paul Adam Mudd is about making the complicated less complex, the tough stuff not so tough, and putting the unreachable within reach of everyone.
He is also a Leadership Rockstar (Apparently) | Keynote | Writer | Commentator | Kaleidoscope Shaker | Influencer | Co-Founder and Director of the Mudd Partnership whose raison d’etre is to develop senior leaders to be simply brilliant | & Co-Creator of the #ThinkHexagon tMP©2021 programme and the DIPOCA tMP©2023 framework.
