Weekly Wisdom – What is my Good Life?

 

Such a question opens our choices for an answer. What is the good? What is your good? And what is a life? We can study options from the traditions of history. But our options always converge at one place. What do you choose? As your answer, your choices, and your way of living. 

 

Perhaps the life you are already living is your good life, and you just have to embrace it. Perhaps your good life is calling you to a journey and a new destination. Perhaps the journey is your good life. In ancient Chinese wisdom there is the notion of destiny. Your destiny is to be you. The good life is to be fully you. Are you a tiger? An elm tree? Does your life have room for you? 

 

Pick a daily moment to be with this question. See what it opens for you. 

 

 

 

As we engage with the possibility of design in our lives and living, the questions of design are always what choices will we make, and for the sake of what do we make them?  Thus the question of what is our good life gives us the chance to design standards for our choices. 

 

In the generative tradition the source of a good life is clarifying what you care about most deeply, and taking care of that care. Our care is what matters to us. It is not desire nor preference. It is an experience. The experience of aliveness. Not excitement, nor novelty, nor fulfillment of desire. It is the deeper sense of “yes” where you would choose no other way to be. It is your source of value, satisfaction, and meaning. 

 

Finding our deepest care is not finding a right answer, passing a test, nor pleasing others. It is the encounter within us with our life itself and brings gratitude. It is alive and changes. It is not an answer to confine ourselves to. It is a lifetime of daily encounter. Where do you make space in your awareness and your days for your encounters?