I already have my life. So do you. You were born with it and it is everpresent. It is all you will ever know and all you will ever own. Even though it is only, really, on loan. This deepening sense of knowing, sinking into, fully inhabiting life is all I want. The overwhelming, comforting exhilaration is all I need. All that is needed.
Most of my attention and energy is in the direction of experiencing my life. My aliveness. As often and as richly as I can. Through an ever expanding experience with as much variation as possible and as much depth as available. This singular focus is not a constraint. It is the opposite. It is emancipation. It is not about control it is about involvement. Not about striving but thriving. Certainly not about replacing old goals with new goals. Whatever happens, happens and that’s fine. Curation without intention. Of course everything is within this focus so perhaps some might see it as no focus at all. Nothing is left out. Everything is welcome.
Yet it is not as easy as it may sound. To maintain and live as this focus. Anything that I am involved in, that draws my attention and energy away from the experience of life, must be worth the exchange. Seeing as how all of life is exchange, making choices about how to be involved is a daily practice. We learn to make choices by sharpening our sight. To be better able to see. What is there. What the exchange will ask of us. Then we engage or we don’t. Innumerable times a day. In infinite ways.
The lives we lead can end up leading us. If we aren’t careful. If we don’t keep a watching brief on our moments, days, seasons, years, ages. This is within our world. The decision to live this way. The determination to live this way. A way in which we live our lives rather than let others live them for us. Or at least we let our lives live us. Which is the way around it actually happens.
So, I write and create and make and converse and relate and shelter and share and encourage fully in the knowledge that it is worth the exchange. Of my life for yours. Of your life for mine. I share something that might help you more fully inhabit your life. You receive it. You might share back. Our lives are entwined, enmeshed and entangled. Or perhaps better to say that they were never separate to start with and we are now more intimate.
I won’t be second guessing my writing here. It will be heart-forged from life not painstakingly crafted to elicit an imagined response in you. Whatever response you have is for you. This is more art than science. Only expression, not coercion. There is nothing for you to do. But do not let anyone or anything distance you from your own life. It is yours, leap into it.
I already have my life.
I already have my life.
Don’t try to convince me,
That it belongs to you.
To take it from me.
Piece by piece.
Then sell it back,
Broken and poor,
On a lifetime lease.
Products.
Policies.
Ideologies.
This has to stop.
It stops with me.
It can stop with you.
Or it can stop you.
I already have my life.
I’ve had it since the start.
It’s all I’ll ever have.
I will know it by heart.
Gavin Birchall