Most of my life has been spent waiting. For life to begin. Real life. Waiting to overcome some obstacle, get through a big test or small task or dull month. Waiting for the day I'll get out of myself, get out of my head, stand taller, feel purged and precise and calm. For the day I'll stop having bad habits and bad breaks and fears about the future. Then my life will begin.
Until I realized that my life was these obstacles. Problems and pain and unmagical mundanity is the very stuff that real life is made of1.
If there's anything to avoid it's this: looking back on your years surprised to discover all the time you let go by unnoticed and unengaged and unenjoyed was precisely your life. A day doesn’t have to be spectacular or grandiose. A day can be something simple and quiet, and that is good and enough. It took me a long time to realize that2.
Real life doesn't begin tomorrow or this weekend, when you finally get a job or finally quit your job, when you get married or get divorced, when you plant roots in a small town or take that trip to Thailand. Real life is here and now. Or it's nowhere at all.
Real life is waking up mildly anxious, frustrated with how much time you spent on your phone last night. It's taking the bus back from the grocery store and wiping lint from the dryer and figuring out what to make for dinner. It’s saying goodbye to your friends after a fun Friday night, happy but somehow a little sad, running your finger along the knife's edge between happiness and melancholy until it bleeds. It's climbing the hill only to see a horizon full of new hills. It's crying because you have no choice but to live the life before you.
Real life is all the hours writing in your journal and long meandering walks and time spent reading novels and poetry and dead people's diaries. The days and weeks and months when it gets dark early or stays light late, thinking about romance and God and the Roman Empire and whether you see your friends enough. It’s staring at a decision so daunting you want to put your head under the covers of your childhood bed or click your heels three times to go back home again. Hurtling downhill faster than you want, trying to slow down, slow time. Keeping a never-ending list of projects to start and projects to finish and goals that you haven't quite got around to. It's feeling behind your friends in at least one area of life. It's realizing we are all alone together.
And real life does not happen on a screen. It's nowhere to be found on an Instagram page or YouTube video or Twitter feed. Your real life is here, in this body, this skin. Embodied doing amidst the tactile and tangible world that surrounds you. Everything exclusively online is not real, not reality, and therefore does not really matter. Real life is with flesh and blood people in the flesh and blood world. Engaging and endlessly enough, even when it’s tedious or boring. Besides, measuring the miles between your real life—the existence you're brutally intimate with—and some glossy, ever-changing, and impossible ideal does nothing but break your spirit. I have never met a single person who has a dream life in reality.
Real life is full of friction and imaginary fears and envisioned futures. Everything feels half-complete, there are so many things you are behind on, so much more you want to do. Miles to go3. I'm right there with you.
This year, I've lived in Texas and Thailand and Tokyo. On both of Canada's coasts and in its biggest cities. I've co-habited with a comedian and a chef, a farmer and a philosopher, a politician, a painter and an ex-priest, a monk and a mechanical engineer. I've become friends with a software developer from Taiwan and a truck driver from Wisconsin. An 80-year-old woman who has studied under sages in India and a man who delivered medicine through the maze of Istanbul's Grand Bazaar. I've spent large swaths of time with a loud millionaire and a quiet wanderer. Countless days working alongside humans from America and China, Germany and England, Italy and France, Australia and New Zealand. I have a friend who works for the world's top consulting firm, a friend who quit working for that consulting firm to host psychedelic retreats, and a friend who just loves to deliver beer.
There are differences, but they are minor and remote. We are all on a similar boat, crossing an unknown sea. Unsure if our path is the best path. Unsure what will come next.
Your experience is all related to whether you can love even what is unpleasant and mundane, whether you can love the landscape of your life during all those hours and days and weeks when you wait, when you hope, when you're impatient for answers, wondering whether you're getting the most out of life, worrying you won't ever meet the fullest most alive version of yourself.
To embrace reality is to accept our real lives, right now, right as they are. It's to stop imagining that you're just one promotion or new hobby or backpacking trip from the perfect life you're imagining for yourself. Really, it's refusing to cling to an abstract idea of how your life should be.
To embrace real life is to drop the deep and firm suspicion that there's a secret and superior way of living. To drop the illusion you're in some waiting period, some holding tank before your real life finally begins. To find a home in the realization that this, here and now, is living. And to stop waiting for some tidal revelation to unveil the grand meaning of existence. It will never come. There are only the little moments, the daily miracles, the matches struck in the dark4.
Real life is the life you are living, in all its gritty and inglorious imperfection.
Real life begins when you give up thinking things should be the way they are not, and realize heaven is here and this is it. No waiting. No arrival.
This is it. This is it. This. Is. It.
Your friend,
If you want to support my work, the best way is by becoming a patron of this publication. I hope you see a subscription is a vote for a world where I do this work and continue to write ambitiously.
If you enjoyed this piece but are not ready to become a patron, you can leave a small tip with Buy Me A Coffee.
👋 what i’ve been up to:
I finished up at the farm in British Columbia and returned East, spending a few days in Toronto with family and dear friends before taking a 5-hour train to Montreal where I’ll spend a week or two wandering around the city, looking longingly at lighted windows, running up Mont Royal, getting lost on Mont Royal, and frequenting used book stores.
Montreal is the Paris of Canada: looming cathedrals, luxurious bakeries, and Haussmann-style architecture. Tasteful and quaint, beautiful from afar and beautiful up close, with an aesthetic sensitivity and a firm commitment to culture.
Last week, I shared with first short story I’ve written in a while. Only with patrons because of how raw and early and unformed it felt.
📸 photos i took:
Autumn in Toronto & Montreal. (Still seeking my Accidentally Wes Anderson aesthetic)
Partially inspired by a quote from Alfred D’Souza on real life.
Sometimes it seems like we don't live very much. Like most of the time we only exist.
But also miles behind, if you stop and notice.
Paraphrasing a line from Virginia Woolf’s, To the Lighthouse.
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece! As someone whose entire career is online, I often question the idea of whether the online world is “reality”. For many, it’s their only reality, and not by choice. I wonder if the question is moe about how we engage with the world (both on- and offline). Having a meaningful conversation about some art we encounter that moves us is so much more alive than the passive consumption of scrolling and empty likes.
But of course no amount of inspiring online things can ever replace the healing salve that is having your hands intertwined with a ball of fresh sourdough, or a used book with some stranger’s scribbles in it. I guess I just see both as being part of the delicate dance of being alive in 2024.
Great piece, I wrote a similar complimenting piece, pasted from my site https://m-chael.com/days-build-life:
What if the most extraordinary moments of your life are actually the most ordinary ones? We often focus on life’s major events - vacations, birthdays, career milestones - but these are rare occurrences in the grand scheme of things, hardly making up the majority of life. An average life consists of around 29,000 days, and the vast majority of these days are filled with routine activities: sleeping, cooking, eating, working, and attending to the countless other tasks that keep our lives running smoothly.
It’s easy to overlook the significance of these ordinary days and the moments that comprise them, dismissing them as unimportant compared to the bigger, more memorable events. I believe that to be a large mistake. These very moments warrant attention and should be elevated with greater significance.
As Annie Dillard observed, how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. The small actions, choices, and moments that make up each day shape our experiences, relationships, and the very quality of our existence—they are the substance of our lives. These mundane experiences, often taken for granted, are the essential components of our lives.
Rising with the sun, preparing food, performing work, conversing with friends and strangers, winding down as daylight fades, turning in to sleep. These routine acts are integral to our daily life. Rather than going through these motions thoughtlessly, there is great meaning in performing even the most mundane tasks with care, earnestness, and attention.
How might your life change if you brought more intention to elevating these daily routines? Arranging your meal with an eye for detail, speaking to others with sincere interest and kindness, and approaching your work with diligence and pride. Over time, this practice will lead to a life of greater fulfillment. While these actions may seem trivial in isolation, their cumulative effect is significant.
“Days build life” serves as a reminder that the richness and depth of our lives are not found solely in the grand, extraordinary events, but in the way we choose to engage with the seemingly mundane moments that make up our daily existence. Actively seeking to elevate the ordinary, to find meaning and beauty in the everyday, and in result building a life of meaning and beauty.
This is not a call for mere gratitude or acknowledgment, but a summons to intentionally craft a life where the sacred is integrated into the ordinary.