It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.

It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.

But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.

We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.

Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d fee/ in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies.

~Matt Haig

when wisdom holds us….

inquiry for today~ make it be ok:)

mesmerized….

After chasing a thousand

things, I could see they 

were all the same.

After breaking a thousand

more, I could see that I

needed to enter the break.

After entering the break, I 

could see the heart in every-

thing.

Now, I can look at a thousand 

waves and know it is one sea.

And feel a thousand feelings

and know it is one life.

And hear a thousand notes 

and know it is one song.

I can listen to a thousand

thoughts and know they 

arise from one ungrasp-

able truth.

So, touch any hand and 

feel all there is to touch 

and know it is one love.

~Mark Nepo