The Good Life — Field-Reading – Week 34
This week I have found myself returning to one of the oldest questions human beings have carried: What is a good life?, and what actually makes a life feel good to live?
Last week was about Entering a New Cycle, and whenever we enter something new, we have an opportunity to become more conscious of what we are actually creating. We can change jobs, move house, begin a relationship, leave a relationship, start studying, travel somewhere new or create an entirely different project, and still carry exactly the same inner patterns with us. A new cycle does not automatically create a new experience of life. At some point we have to ask ourselves what we want the new cycle to contain.
What Does Your Good Life Look Like?
This week I have met this question through many different people and situations, and I have become increasingly aware that The Good Life cannot have one universal definition. What feels deeply meaningful to me may not be meaningful to you. One person longs for family and community, another for solitude and nature. Someone dreams of building a company, while someone else dreams of working less. One person wants to travel the world, while another has finally discovered that the place they most want to be is home.
One of our mistakes has been believing that there is one template for a good life and that our task is to become successful at achieving it. So I want to turn this week’s Field-Reading toward you: What does The Good Life actually mean to you?
If nobody were watching your life, what would you choose?
If there were no social media, no comparison and nobody to impress, what would remain important?
Where do you feel most alive?
Who are the people with whom you can truly be yourself?
What are you doing because you genuinely love it, and what are you still doing because you once learned that you should?
If you already had enough, what would you stop chasing?
The Good Life and the Peaceful Life
Something else has become very visible to me this week: the enormous amount of drama we are surrounded by. We see it in systems, workplaces, relationships, television, social media and public conversations. There always seems to be another conflict asking for our attention, another disagreement we could enter, another story we could become emotionally entangled in. But being able to see drama does not mean that we have to become part of it.
There is a profound difference between ignoring what is happening around us and refusing to surrender our inner state to everything happening around us. We can remain awake. We can care deeply. We can speak when something needs to be said and act when something needs to change, while still learning not to allow every storm around us to become a storm inside us.
The Good Life is also The Peaceful Life, and this raises another question:
How much of the disturbance in our lives actually belongs to us, and how much have we unconsciously agreed to carry because we stepped into someone else’s storm?
The Good Life Requires Participation
There is another side to this that I find equally important, because dreaming about The Good Life is not the same as creating it. At some point, what we say matters to us has to become visible in the way we use our days.
One of the commitments I have made to my own future is to publish a short video every day for an entire year. Each individual video may seem like a very small action, but for me it represents something much larger. Every time I record, speak, publish and share, I am taking another small action in the direction of the life I have chosen to create. This is where dreams become interesting.
What are you doing today that belongs to the life you say you want tomorrow?
Your action is writing one page of a book. Making one phone call. Walking for thirty minutes. Having the conversation you have postponed. Applying for the education you keep thinking about. Spending more time with your children. Saving money. Creating something. Resting. Leaving something. Beginning something.
The action does not always need to be dramatic, but it needs to exist. Because The Good Life is created much less through the enormous decisions we make once or twice in our lifetime, and much more through the seemingly insignificant choices we repeat every ordinary Tuesday morning.
Creating The Good Life Together
This weekend, I will explore this even more deeply through a Monad ceremony with my cousin and sister. Part of our intention is precisely this: to become clearer about the life we want to create and then become willing to take the actions that bring that life into form.
Ceremony can help us stop long enough to listen, but afterwards we return to ordinary life, and this is where the creation continues. And when we share our lives with a partner or family, there is another beautiful question waiting for us: Have we ever actually told each other what The Good Life means to us?
We may live beside someone for years while carrying completely different pictures of the future. What would happen if we sat down together and asked: What do we want our life to feel like? What matters to us now? What do we want more of? What are we willing to have less of? Where do we want to spend our time? What does enough look like for us?
Creating a shared life begins by daring to speak about the life we actually want to share.
How Do We Live Well in Times of Crisis?
This same question runs through this week’s Divine Design Podcast: “How Do We Live Well in Times of Crisis?” Together with Veerle, I take the conversation beyond our individual lives and into the larger world we are living in, because The Good Life cannot only be a question for peaceful times. It becomes even more important when the world feels uncertain.
How do we remain centered when circumstances around us are changing?
How do we care about what is happening without becoming consumed by it?
How do we stay connected to Earth, to one another and to what is meaningful when so much around us seems to demand our fear?
And how do we continue creating a life worth living while acknowledging the reality of the world in which that life exists?
The podcast goes deeper into these questions, and I invite you to listen after this week’s Field-Reading. This week is asking us to become brave enough to keep asking the question.
What is a good life for me now?
What brings me peace?
What am I giving my precious time to?
Which storms require my participation, and which can I simply observe?
What do I want to create with the people I love?
And what small action can I take today that belongs to the life I say I want?
Because The Good Life is not waiting somewhere in the future for us to finally reach it.
We are already building it, one conscious day at a time.