My friend yesterday asked me, “What’s the one thing that you admire the most in life?”
I thought for a moment and said, “Being alive.”
It’s not about being physically alive, but rather mentally alive. Though it may have been a spontaneous answer, I’ve been thinking about it for a while.
We should all ask ourselves that question: “Am I really alive?”
If you can’t figure out what being alive feels like, look at a kid. My sister’s kid was home for the past week, and I was learning what it’s like to be truly alive.
Kids don’t care about the past or worry about the future. I think rules for being happy is this simple, but it’s not easy because we are emotional beings carrying a lot of emotions for ourselves and others and even some of which are instilled in us intentionally or unintentioanlly.
But once in a while, practice being in the moment with yourself, enjoying the present without any distractions.
What I do is smile and try to embrace what’s beautiful around me. This really helps. We are, for the most part, living what our younger selves once wished for. When you have that, why not celebrate it?
Yes, our desires change, but what about your younger self? Do justice to them; embrace the kid you once were, and you may even have everything that kid once wished for and never celebrated or felt the joy of achieving them (I wanted to place an image here that I once saw on Instagram: The younger self asks the older self, “Can you afford Kinder Joy?” The older self replies, “Yes, many.” Then the younger self says, “Then you’ve won in life.” If you come across it, ping me :)
Efforts and milestones doesn’t matter if you don’t give yourself time to enjoy the things you achieved, the effort you spent, and the people who helped you get here.
Figuring Out What Really Matters
They say money doesn’t matter,
fitness doesn’t matter!
Yes, it’s totally subjective. But have you ever felt what it’s like to be truly free of money? What it’s like to be truly fit — to really say it doesn’t matter? Or are they just saying it like “kittatha munthiri puliyayirikkum!?”
There are some experiences and questions in life you cannot answer from a book or from someone else, you have to try, experience, and achieve it with effort yourself.
If wisdom could be imparted through words alone, we’d all be done here.
Maybe you might enjoy the journey, the people alongside you, or the experiences more when you finaly reach your destiny. It will be different for everyone, but you never know which one you will be enjoying the most. So, do what makes you alive—that’s all that matters.
If you want to enjoy your life, you want to be mentally alive.
If you want to feel alive, you should be doing the things that make you alive.
If you want to know what makes you alive, you should understand what you really love to do.
If you want to understand what you really love to do, you should look into yourself and have clarity about yourself.
Life’s hard, but if you can figure out what you really want, you’ll understand it’s more risky to just “stay alive”.
Figure out what you really want in life and choose that life.
Some Resouces if you found the topic intresting
- Focus on What Matters by Khashayar Forouzfar
- The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware
- The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
- Hrithik Roshan on Knowing what you want
- Neurosurgeon quit his job when he understood its not his path
Books
Videos
Quote and illustrations are taken from the book The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant