Dear Readers,
Who amongst you is old enough to remember a UK number one hit from 1982 called Happy Talk? I remember it well. I have sung those lyrics to my kids more than twenty years after it was released because they’re catchy and they are meaningful. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look it up. The artist was Captain Sensible and if I hadn’t looked it up today, I would never have known that the song was actually written by Rodgers and Hammerstein for the 1949 musical, South Pacific which was a huge hit back in the day. Seems like the lyrics continued to resonate with people well into the 80s and beyond. I know they’re kind of corny and some might say ‘basic’, but as I get older and wiser, I’m finding the simpler things more meaningful. I was singing the song in my head as I thought about what I want to share with you today.
‘Happy talk,
Keep talkin’ happy talk,
Talk about things you’d like to do.
You gotta have a dream;
If you don’t have a dream,
How you gonna have a dream come true?’
Groundhog Day
Do you ever feel like your life is just going around in a circle, like in the movie Groundhog Day? You know the one, where the actor (Bill Murray) wakes up one day and realises that he is reliving the same day every day. I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. Thanks to the insights of the great philosophers of the centuries, the concept of time has been considered and explored in ways that I find mesmerising. I’m not in a position, intellectually, to make sense of all the different theories but I do like what John Locke, the British philosopher and physician from the 17th century, had to say about it. He argued that our concept of time originates in experience. Here’s a radical question for you: if you wake up each day at the same time, carry out the same tasks in the same order, see the same people, think the same thoughts, eat the same food, go to the same places and then you rinse and repeat, haven’t you lived for just one day? I think that’s what John Locke was getting at. How would you feel about that when you’re near the end?
What is worth my time?
I know on one level what is worth my time: my family, my wellbeing, making a positive difference to people’s lives. But there are other things that matter to me too, but it requires thoughtful consideration to figure it out. I wonder how many of us actually stop what we’re doing for long enough to contemplate the important questions that will help us figure out who we really are. Are we living the life that others expect of us, or are we being true to who we are at the core? Do we even know who we are and what matters to us? These are the questions that I believe need to be addressed if we are to live a life that feels meaningful to each of us. No one person will attach exactly the same meaning to the many experiences that life has to offer us which is why we need to go inside to discover what makes each of us tick.
Back to now
Many of my previous blogs have touched on the importance of being grounded in the present moment, so back to now I go! When I leave the past behind, and stop myself from anticipating the future, I can savour the moment. Yet, in the now, I have a kind of background awareness of what it is I still want to achieve in my life. It’s not my main focus, but it is nonetheless there as a guide to ensure that I stay on track in the present. To put this into context I want to share what’s been going on with me recently. To be frank, I’ve been a bit lost. At the beginning of this year, I wanted to reinvent myself. Sounds weird, I know, but after 19 years of being a stay-at-home Mum, I felt I was ready to focus more on my own needs for a change. While I love being a counsellor, I am not qualified enough to work for a counselling organisation, and I am not motivated enough to market myself in the way that’s required to keep me busy for many hours per day. I can’t sit at home either and expect clients to come to me. So, I had to reassess my goals and figure out what was stopping me. Why wasn’t I motivated to market myself? It took some exploring, and I eventually found the answer. My dream has always been to be a published author who entertains readers with thought-provoking, emotive stories. It was only this week, after a fairly painful discussion with my son, that I had to face my deeply held beliefs that I am not good enough. Why would anyone want to read my stories? I was honestly shocked at how sad this made me feel. I cried myself to sleep that night for having abandoned a dream that I’d held onto for decades. I think the fact that I’d moved to a foreign country with two small kids and never felt integrated here because of the nature of being a stay-at-home Mum, I lost all confidence in my abilities. Then I naively applied for jobs based on a Diploma and zero work experience which of course generated nothing but rejection. That blew me into a sort of limbo where I’ve wallowed for the past few months. Thankfully I no longer have an unhealthy drinking habit to contend with; that would have made things a whole lot worse. Meditation has helped me enormously to calm my agitated mind and find the peace I needed to be ready for the truth when it finally revealed itself.
The truth
If a human life is on average less than a thousand months long, God only knows how many I have left to live. I am going to optimistically work on the basis that I have 300 or so. Of those, I will spend one third in bed sleeping. This leaves me with 200 months based on living to be about 83. I am 58 years old, and I have roughly 200 months of living left if I’m lucky enough. When I looked at these numbers the other day, I got one hell of a jolt. As I said, I’m not going to dwell too much on the future because I would very quickly descend into extreme anxiety. But bearing in mind the number of months, I want to be happy in the present moment knowing that I am working towards the goal of fulfilling a dream that has always been with me since I can remember. I owe it to myself to do my best to achieve this goal. In between the hard work that’s required of me to fulfill my dream of becoming a published author, I aim to ensure that I experience life in ways that make me feel alive. That’ll be different for everyone. For me, it’s about learning new things, random acts of kindness that will make others feel good, exploring nature in places I’ve never been before, experimenting with exercise to see how my body responds (I’m on a mission to climb the tallest building in the world using the Stairmaster at my gym) and making new friends.
Sitting in a chair is not enough
It is a fact that most people who are close to death, when asked what gave meaning to their lives, never talk about how long they lived, instead they talk about the experiences they had. Often, sadly, they regret the things they didn’t do, and rarely what they did do.
Life is measured by experiences not by how much time we spent on the planet.
I will leave you today with these lines from a beautiful Chinese poem from the ancient Book of Songs, ‘I wake, expecting to see the blossoms of spring; and find that the rains of autumn have begun.’
Explore the depths of your inner being, find those dreams, and live them before it’s too late! Love, Gill x
