We’re born, we live, if we’re lucky, and we die. That life might be long or short and, to a certain extent, the length is immaterial. It’s how we live that’s important. Too many people – and I’ve certainly been guilty of it in my time – waste years by trying to ‘live’ in the future. “I’ll do that when I retire/earn enough money/lose weight/get fit/whatever”. What if ‘when’ doesn’t happen? What if, having retired/made a million/lost weight or got fit you find that the end has come? When you look back from that great vantage point in the sky, how much happier do you think you would have been if you’d enjoyed the ride and fully experienced every moment instead of waiting impatiently for it to pass to get to ‘when’? It’s a bit like going on holiday. A lot of people work themselves into the ground before a break, endure the journey to their holiday destination and then are amazed that they can’t relax when they get there! The journey is the holiday, as is the work that needs doing before you go. It just depends on how you treat it. It’s taken half a century, but I’d like to think that these days, wherever possible, I live each day enjoying the journey and not having my hopes and dreams pinned on the destination.
I was given a lesson in how to live just this afternoon. I’m away with friends and the grandson of one of them is a little boy, aged six but with numerous physical problems and the intellectual capacity of a three year old. My friend and I said that we would take him to the beach, which is across the car park from where we’re staying. After a few minutes of Luke stopping at every stone, stick or puddle, my friend got impatient and asked him to hurry up. And then it occurred to me that he was doing exactly what I strive to do – live in the moment. To Luke, each pebble, each pool of water was its own little world and he was fully a part of it. We could see the ‘bigger picture’ – i.e. that we were just in a car park and that it would be a lot more fun on the beach – but Luke was having fun where he was. He wasn’t concentrating on the bigger, ‘better‘ destination, just living happily in the moment.
Now I’m not suggesting that to live like
Luke does is always possible as adults with responsibilities and
deadlines. There are things we all
have to do in order to be able to exist – like getting ready for our
holiday. All I’m saying is that if
we undertake each task as an entity in itself, we can live in each moment and
make each event along the way as important as the outcome. Life isn’t about the things we have to
do but about the people we want to be. And mainly, about being happy, of which,
more later.
