There is nothing more precious than life. We often lose sight of this, burying life behind the darkness of our anxieties, our plans, our ambitions.
Life is all around us, but so easily missed. It is in the sparkling eyes of children who are enjoying the playground for the first time on a watery spring morning. It is in the expectant eyes of a person who feels another’s love, but awaits confirmation that it is true. Life is a dim but present sparkle in the eyes of someone who has been hard done by, and has opened a door of hope through the kindness and caring of another.
We only see these things if we are looking for them, and only understand them if we are at peace with ourselves and the world. Otherwise, they are glimmers and shards which we glimpse, but never see in their whole splendour.
Gentle caring love. Life. Second chances. Life. Sweet, simple moments of shared bliss. Life.
The trouble is that we forget life is something that must be nurtured and cared for. It must be treasured and protected, but also allowed to be free and grow, unstifled. Indeed, life is a delicate balance between structure and freedom, between inspiration and stability, between action and quietude. Finding this balance is the single most important journey that many of us will take.
We find great traces of the path in the feelings of others. We know when we’ve had a positive impact on the life of another person, and we also know when we’ve had a negative one. Strangely, this doesn’t necessarily come naturally. The good life has to be built, and just as we need to learn the craft of building house and master the use of tools to do it, so too must we learn the craft of living. For living is a conscious practice.
Living is a practice which requires examination. Examination of ourselves, our actions and their results, and observation of others, how their actions, attitudes and words impact our life and what we observe to be the effects they have on the other people they touch. These are the signposts on the path of life. However, when we observe, it is important that we observe with a loving eye. For to observe judgmentally without love, is to never be able to truly understand another. There is a big difference between having a critical but loving gaze when we observe others, and judging them. Loving critique is human, but judgment is mechanical. This way, even our mistakes and falls become but forks on a sunlit path, rather than pitfalls which lead us into darkness.
In the end, as we sit on patios and porches, sipping drinks and chatting, playing games or reading, surrounded by nature and the artifice of human construction, we can, if we take a moment to breathe and feel our world, feel at peace with its rhythms, its heartbeat, and thereby begin to intuitively feel that we have a special place in its arms. A place that we define by ourselves but which is also defined by others for us. In the end it is a place built of negotiation, examination and observation.
We are on the path to the good life when we find the flow of the world around us and sync ourselves to that flow. Then life becomes a harmonious whole, rather than a series of challenging episodes. Life also then becomes something that we no longer seek to control, but rather something that we seamlessly feel we belong to and belongs to us.
The good life is worth seeking. In fact, the journey is probably just as good as the destination, since it is a journey that must be guided by love, empathy, caring and forgiveness of ourselves and of others. In fact, the journey is the destination. The good life is an evolving thing, a state of being, the set of all of our actions, attitudes, words, feelings and thoughts.
In fact, you are living right now. Why not seek to make your life a good life? The journey is the destination.
Really, there is no better occupation of our time.