Life

How to Build a Meaningful Life – Part 2 (Your Choice)

How Do I Live the Rest of My Life in a Fulfilling Way?

A life is a gift. We won the lottery at birth and got one for free. Our life has a personal bank account of time that started with 80 years at the beginning (if we’re lucky) and is slowly getting spent with each passing minute.

At birth, there was an ideal life for each of us to live. A life that would bring us the maximum amount of fulfillment possible at every moment until we die.

That life didn’t happen. Its full potential wasn’t realized and never will be.

Then there’s our real life. The one we’re living now. The imperfect one.

The life where mistakes have already been made, traumas internalized, and aspirations buried.

Our initial ideal life is gone forever. Boo-hoo.

However, in every passing moment a new updated ideal path is laid before us. A path that’s integrated with the scars, histories, and handicaps that we’ve acquired from birth until this exact moment.

It’s our choice to try and live it or not.

Our past and our future don’t matter.

What matters is that in each moment, as our lives pass us by, there is always a single best action to take. An action that when taken consistently leads us in the direction of the most fulfilling remainder of our lives.

It’s impossible to give anyone specific advice on which action to take right now, or what to do with the rest of their life. That best action and hence best way to live is different for everyone. It automatically updates at every passing moment and can’t be determined without considering every unique aspect of our history and the constraints of our present situation.

Hence, the answer can only be known inside each of us.

The potential to live out the rest of our lives in a meaningful way resides in all of us. But having potential and actually living it are two different things.

Firstly, deciding what to do isn’t easy. Some people tell us to “follow our bliss” and it will lead us to our most fulfilling life. But most of us are so disconnected from our feelings that we wouldn’t recognize our bliss if it slapped us in the face.

For a lot of us, living out a potentially meaningful life will require that we constantly improve our physical, emotional, and spiritual connection: to ourselves, to others and to the world around us. In doing so, we may gradually feel with more clarity what our best action should be at each moment.

Even so, seeing our path isn’t the same as walking it.

We’ve all experienced moments where we knew the “right thing to do” but we lacked the courage to act, to tell the truth, or to stand up for ourselves or others.

Life always presents us with potential “adventures”, each with its unique trials to overcome. At any given moment, which adventure we choose depends on how well we recognize our bliss’s calling (our single best action or direction). Whether we overcome the trials depends on our level of courage and discipline in action. So, to actually execute our “best action” we need to develop courage.

Nature has a tendency to move from simplicity to complexity. The universe expands. Evolution progresses.

When we adventure out (or inward) and overcome trials we learn new skills and ways of seeing the world. That’s how we personally become more complex.

But, our lifetime is limited. Our 80 years are running out quickly. Hence, it wouldn’t make sense for life to reward us if we spend all of our time just going on adventures of personal growth.

The knowledge and skills we earn can’t end with us as individuals. There’s only one type of life that grows without contributing anything and that’s the cancerous cell. Humans are not a cancer.

Just like how we’re neurochemically wired to like sex, so that we’ll reproduce. Our brains also release pleasure chemicals like dopamine and oxytocin when we give unconditionally to others.

At some point our “best action” needs to include contribution to others.

Some people say that giving is the key to life. Giving is important. It’s one of four steps in a cyclical process.

Our “current best action” and hence life is meant to move us through a 4-step cycle.

  1. Listen to our Intuition -> 2. Adventure -> 3. Grow -> 4. Contribute

These steps are each neurochemically rewarding, and together lead to the healthy growth of humanity as a whole.

This is not my theory. These steps can be seen as an overview of the Heroes Journey. The single mythical teaching about “how to live” that has been told for millennia across continents, in every major religion and philosophy. Which was originally organized in 1949 by Joseph Campbell in his work “The Hero with 1000 Faces”.

We are all meant to be students and teachers at the same time. The way we learn is by adventuring out, overcoming trials, and combining our personal experience with the teachings from those who went before us. The way we contribute is by teaching, supporting, or inspiring those a little further behind on a similar path.

If we repeat this cycle constantly on micro and macro levels. Over days, years, and in its entirety over the full course of our lives. We give ourselves the best chance of living out the rest of our lives in a meaningful way.

It doesn’t seem to be an accident that our ability to follow each part of the cycle is directly dependent on one of the four cornerstone traits of the human psyche as first categorized in the west by psychologist Carl Jung.

  1. Connectedness/Compassion -> 2. Courage/Discipline -> 3. Insightfulness/Wisdom -> 4. Leadership/Service

This leads me to believe that self-actualization is an important aspect of living the cycle.

When we develop ourselves. When we as Mahatma Gandhi said, “Be the change that we wish to see in the world.” When we make a habit of seeking self-actualization. It becomes much easier to always know and execute our “best current action”. The one that when done consistently leads us through our own unique “Heroes Journey” and provides us with our best, most fulfilling life.

I’ve probably got about 50 years left (if I’m lucky). You have your own diminishing bank account.

Our best possible lives already didn’t happen. But that doesn’t stop us from feeling fulfilled in living out what we have left…

What specific action to take right now? Which part of the cycle to follow? Which cornerstone trait of the human psyche to develop?

That’s our responsibility to figure out…

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