Notes for radical living:

Make friends with chaos

Hold a calm mind

Let things shake

Forgive human frailty

Champion second chances

Defy unkindness

Reverence fellowship

Listen to the quiet

Respect the young

Seek growth

Dance daily

Bless the handmade

Sing into pain

Challenge assumptions

Follow the wind

Look upwards

Swoon under clouds

Feel your courage

Be trustworthy

Take care of yourself

Believe in goodness

Head for the light

~Tilda Swinton

lifting up the simple ways of being…

inquiry for today~ maybe and just maybe again…

further away….

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 feel 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