‘Live life like it’s your last day!’, the blog post says cheerfully.

And you feel guilty, instead of inspired.

You feel like shit, to be honest.

Because you are not living life like it’s your last day: you are living life like it’s the day your asshole colleague sent you a shitty email, the day you looked in the mirror and didn’t like what stared back at you, the day your bank account is getting emptier than you can handle comfortably, the day you had wine (real early) instead of herbal tea, and the day that the bright sun is not positive, but fucking annoying.

Self-help and motivational quotes can land terribly wrong.

Just like good advice, served when the timing is off.

We are all stumbling around from mood to mood, and if life doesn’t feel particularly awesome right now, your sweet attempt at brightening my day can feel like a direct insult.

I see this on twitter all the time, where a simple and well-meant ‘Good morning!’ can be countered by a person mentioning war and cancer and flesh-eating viruses.

It can be hard to remember that we are all in the same place AND have a completely different experience simultaneously.

The sun is not always a source of childlike happiness.

It is easy to overlook how we get stuck in our heads and blame the world for the result.

That’s why the only true way to live a life in expanding freedom, is to become radically conscious.

As long as we are lost in the tides that are created by random mental waves, we’ll fall victim to the temporary state of our personal minds.

Our stories will dictate our well-being, and the best thing we can hope for, is better stories.

Waking up means being aware of how it all plays out, but from a less personal and anxious perspective.

It makes it a lot easier to enjoy the story we’re engaged in, and works wonders for our decisions, levels of empathy, joy, creativity and overall wellbeing.

You will never find lasting freedom in quotes -although inspirational snacks can definitely lift you up sometimes.

Life is free by nature, free and wild and all over the place and messy, and conscious living means a deep and direct experience of this boundless, juicy freedom.

Sometimes you read a post like this and get struck by a blast of relief and gratefulness.

And sometimes you finish it hesitantly and think that I’m an ignorant moron, a naïve dreamer with no true connection to the real, dark, nasty world.

I get that.

But it hardly gets me anymore.

Living life like that is pretty cool.

 

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(Photo by @sharmine27, for Unsplash)