How to design a good life
I would love to live like a river flows
carried by the surprise of its own unfolding
— John O’Donohue
For the first two decades of life, we are pushed along a straight and wide river. But, somewhere around age 20, we get spit out and left to cross an unknown sea without any prescribed path or good guidance.
When you’re used to following a script, it’s hard to learn to write one. When the script is finished, it can feel like the story is over. At least, the pleasant parts. This is disquieting at best, depressing at worst.
The mark of maturity is to move from reading the script to writing your own.
Wisdom, boiled down, is making the story you inhabit beautiful.
~~~
Most of designing a good life, a life that fits you, is letting go of what you think it should look like, all the preconceived notions for the dream career/partner/city, and instead being open to what presents itself continually. Simply put: paying attention. When you're too focused on making exactly what you want happen, you become blind to the real life you're living and miss the real opportunities all around you.
I think seeing what you want to do in life is an act of sensitivity. Sallying forth into the world, taking on adventures and side quests, and noticing what feelings dawn on you, what your senses say, what moods are generated by certain surroundings1.
In dating discourse, it's common advice that you probably have no clue what your ideal partner looks like. Starting by saying "I want this type of relationship," or "I want a person that looks like this," is backward. It's assuming you already know what the end should look like. But you don't. If you were to meet the perfect person on paper, there's a chance you wouldn't click. At all.
Rather, you engage in friendly environments where you bump into a bunch of different, almost randomly sampled, people and notice what qualities they draw out of you, who you become in their presence. Then look for patterns in who makes you feel excited and alive and true and heard. And move toward that. Not even for romance, but simply as a human being you want around.
I think designing a good life works the same.
~~~
Dreams are an essential part of a vital life, but they cannot become more real than reality. The trap I fall into is letting my fondness for an ideal future become a fixation on fantasy. Dazed by the divine image of how things could look, instead of working with the raw and gritty reality of my real life.
I have a romantic vision, carved somewhere up in the clouds, that I want to pull down to earth, yet I must be wary to assume I know what the end result should look like. The vision is alluring and motivating, but it's also half-baked.
To remain receptive to course correction is an act of humility. Which is hard, but also heroic. As all children know, pride is the downfall of the villain2.
Looking back, if I never allowed randomness or serendipity to divert my path, if I stayed stubbornly anchored to old convictions, I would have ended up magnificently miserable when I got exactly what I wanted. The fairy tales tell us this. The princess who is dreamily in love with Prince Charming, willingly blind to the red flags, soon discovers he's a monster after marriage.
Dreams must be regularly bathed, out of a certain cleanliness of the soul. Surprise should be opened to, invited in. Used as soap3.
The idea isn't to dispense with goals and dreams and plans; we need them to orient toward a direction and motivate ourselves to move forward. Desire is a beautiful emotion. The idea is to hold them loosely, to realize they're amenable to change because they're probably at least a little wrong. Really, it's a willingness to let whatever parts of ourselves die off when life demands it4. It's a kind of conversation with reality, with God.
There is a painful disillusionment when people wish their lives turned out differently than they did that can only be described as bitterness. After all, it is the absurd emotions that cut the deepest. The longing for the impossible, the remorse over not being someone else, the nostalgia for what never was and desire for what could have been5. If there’s anything to avoid, it’s becoming bitter.
~~~
It has been a strange and scary two weeks. I've written the closing words on a chapter of traveling and transience, deciding to stay put somewhere and pursue a full-time job. But wondering plenty. Where I want to live. How close to family. What work I actually want to do. Whether I'd be fulfilled working under artificial light at a desk job, even a good one. Whether I should keep traveling.
But it's paralyzing to sit and ponder the immensity of these looming decisions and the ripple effects on my life. I don’t know what will happen, but I know I cannot figure it out by thinking.
Fate is not found. It is crashed into. Some small events can be engineered, I think, but the central pillars of our lives will always come on a swell of serendipity6.
I am impatient to cross the unknown sea of life. To find my way. But it's a patient process to shape the right life. One of being very attentive to the day-to-day, to what makes you alive and what makes you frustrated and trying to iterate increasingly toward aliveness. Constantly extracting information from experience. Leaving room for little detours, little steps, little discoveries; as small as they may seem.
It's the daunting, difficult, but deliberate act of starting with what you have, starting with where you are, starting with what you can confidently call your own. Starting close in7. The ground beneath your feet, despite how pale and paltry it appears.
It's a series of surprises but evolves organically into a more well-designed life than a vision of a highly architected marble tower that crumbles when it makes contact with the concrete of reality.
It takes faith. You don't know where you'll go, where each surprise, each twist and turn of fate, will lead. But, in the end, while it will look nothing like you ever imagined, it fits.
Doubt but move. Doubt and move. Doubt and grow8.
That's it.
Doubt and grow.
Yours,
Writing this piece over the last four weeks felt like trying to catch a bar of soap in the shower. The ideas had been percolating for a while, but pulling it all together required some mental gymnastics. Perhaps 90% of what was written got cut.
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👋 what i’ve been up to:
I spent another week in Montreal, going bouldering and to a classical concert at the symphony orchestra, then took a train back home for the holidays. For the first time in a long time, I don’t have another trip planned.
Back home, I’m starting winter projects, career conversations, and enjoying the ritual of cold and dark winter mornings. Restarting the wood stove, making coffee, writing, and swimming in the frigid lake.
📸 photos i took:
Montreal in November.
Socrates once said he was different from other men, because he always listened to his daemon. The intimate, private voice of conscience. Except his daemon never told him what to do, only what not to do. Threatened by the Athenians with execution for corrupting the youth, Socrates could have left town, but, to his own disappointment, his daemon told him not to. He listened, despite the price being death.
In a similar sense, I think God works more through the path of “not here”, than “here”. Your path is defined, moment to moment, more by where it is not, than where it clearly is. Your path is a continual discovery of "no, not this, not here, not now," even when your intuition evades reason or escapes justification. The art of noticing is remaining perceptive to what feels wrong. Over time, you'll gradually find yourself in a place that is exactly right.
Real life is the obstacles themselves. The never-ending stream of problems that upset your plan. But it's a revelation to discover that you are not the plan, nor the obstacles. You are the thing that overcomes each obstacle. You are the thing that knows every obstacle is information rich and contains something you need to know. The obstacle is the path.
Many plans are in a man’s mind, But it is the Lord’s purpose for him that will stand (Proverbs 19:21).
The danger of the intellect is its tendency to fall in love with its own creation. The overdeveloped intellect has no room for faith and that is what makes it miserable. Embodied by the archetypal evil genius
Another way of thinking about this: Surprise is signal. Signal there is something you do not yet know but might need. If you already knew it, it wouldn't have been a surprise.
The fundamental myth of humankind is the voluntary acceptance of suffering and death to be reborn, continually. It is the meta-narrative all myth points toward. The sacrifice that quite literally saves the world.
Paraphrasing Fernando Pessoa here.
Yet, we can open ourselves to finding and being found. We can grease the rusty wheels of fate. Increase our serendipity surface area. Effort and intention can be applied to steer fate. The gods love virtue but perhaps sweat even more.
A line inspired by one of my favorite poems by David Whyte, Start Close In.
I think my friend Steven Foster said this to me once, but I can't quite remember.
This was the right essay I needed to read at the right time. Thanks Tommy
Realism at it's best. Thanks Tommy.