Principle Point 11/29/08

Man is born to live, not to prepare for life.

Boris Pasternak
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I used to say that I was waiting for my life to start. I said that because I always had my eye on something bigger, different, something more, and I felt that everything I was doing was just a step to get me there. Some steps were better than others and a few of them were steps back. Meanwhile I was basically ignoring the importance to me of where I was and what I was doing. I thought there must be more to it and I was missing it somehow and that therefore I needed to arrange my life to experience more. John Lennon once said "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

So at about the age of 50 I began to wake up and realize that I was living my life, that the life I was living was in fact my life. That's when I could say "Don't wonder what your next step in life is, it's the one right in front of you."

This mistake of preparing to live is an insidious trick we play on ourselves to get us to stop concentrating on and hence stop appreciating the life we have. The happiest people are those who have not packed their lives away in a time capsule to be opened at some future date, those who have settled with the past and let it gather dust in some forgotten attic and who know how to "seize the day" as Horace wrote.

I am more alive today than I am at any future day. And if I remain alive to each day as it comes I will be as much alive on any future day as I am now. That's life, and that's the best kind of preparation there is.



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