I was asked to do this: produce a recipe for a good life. If you were to ask any of my friends for their recipes, you would find them very similar to mine. If we did not share a few values, a few ingredients, then it is unlikely that we would have become friends or remained so.
If you were to ask any of my friends for their recipes for a good life, you would also find them very different to mine. We live very different lives. They intersect and mesh, as much because of our differences as because of our similarities.
A recipe for a good life is like a recipe for a good cake. The cake recipe can only be good insofar as it conforms to the kind of cake you are trying to bake. The most amazing Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte recipe is going to make a very poor Bánh bò. A Charlotte recipe, no matter how fine, will turn out a poor Cremeschnitte. Oh, I could go on! So many cakes.
Likewise, so many kinds of lives to be lived, all of them fabulous in their own way. All of them the mix of sweet and savoury deliciousness adjusted to the taste of the baker, the cake-connoisseur and the life-liver.
So yes, I will give you a recipe, but it comes with the warning that you should not use it. You may try, but it will not turn out the perfect life you’re wanting, not as written. Your oven temperature may need adjusting. Your eggs and milk may be richer, or less so. You may want less sweetness. How am I to know? Play around, experiment, tweak, adjust. Add ingredients, leave some out.
As an aside I made a glorious cod, sweet potato & coconut soup last night. I deliberately swapped out creamed coconut in favour of coconut milk, but it was only this morning that I thought oh, there should have been tomatoes in that. There wasn’t. There won’t be next time I make it either. I like it better, simpler.
Our recipes need to evolve as we do, and a lot of my current evolution is based around simplifying things. So any complexity you find int what follows might not be there this time next year, or the year after. But so far as it goes, this is my current recipe:
- Start with Love, and Luck, and Laughter –copious quantities, add to taste along the way, save some for sprinkling where staleness creeps in. If at any time the mixture splits, add in more Love. If it starts to sour, dose it with laughter. And always, always, always, stir in the luck.
- Health comes next. Take what you can get, knead & work it, let it prove and let it rest.
My aunts always said if you have your health, you have everything. Not true. If you have your health you have the basis: a good stock, or a good dough, but in and of itself it has little flavour. We enjoy our health for the flavours of life it enables us to take on, not for its own sake.
Every life will have its health challenges, small or large, temporary or permanent. We simply need to work with what we have. Limitations shape the outcome – but not always for the worse. They may simply nudge us down paths we might not else have considered, and down those unexpected alleys may be where our destiny shines. Not being able to do one thing, forces us to look at others.
Equally, being sound of body and mind, perfect in all our physicality, does not guarantee that we will use our time well.
Measure your health by what it enables you to do today. AND DO IT, and be grateful. I am never going to run a marathon, but occasionally I run down a hill, just for the delight of doing so. - Build a Home. Whatever your dreams of travel, fame, or fortune, build a home, a sanctuary to which you can return. Fill it with Warmth and Friends and Family. Fill it with Food and Fun.
At least, some of the time, but...
also, as well, in addition, let everyone know that it is only sometimes the party palace; at others it is a hermit cave; at others it is the family den, at others an artist’s studio, at others a writer’s retreat, at others it is the office where serious work must be completed, at others…ah at others it is the place about which you do not talk, it is your soul space, the place where you can be you in silence. At others it is (at least in part) a sacred space.
The cave may hold more than you alone, but be sure to construct a corner of it, a whole room if you are lucky, a table time-share if need be, or a bathroom hour, where you can come home to yourself. Make that space sacrosanct. Make it peaceful. For it is more necessary than you know.
Building a home does not require that you lay bricks, only that you lay intention and boundaries. A home may be mobile. You may build one in a series of rented flats. Or in the tent you carry on your back. Building a home is not about physicality, it is about bounded space that expresses who you are and allows you to respect that.
Whatever its shape and size, whatever its fixed or fluid positioning, the place we call home (for always or for now) is the incubator of our dreams. It is the oven. It where the alchemy happens, because for all the work we put into our lives, our day-jobs, our art – home is where we rest, where we play, where we don’t pretend. Home is where mad ideas slowly come to temperature and start to shift into something more. - Find your Community. Friends and family, love them as we do, are insufficient. They form a shifting but still closed circle – too small, perhaps too fixed, perhaps not overlapping in that arena of who we are that is most important to us. Friendship and Family – as much as we might want to argue otherwise – are relationships that are firmly founded on reciprocity, which comes with a hint of duty and a smattering of obligation. We commit to it freely, and maybe even savour its taste, but it is there.
So at times we need to venture into wider communities, the places where we can contribute without obligation, where we can receive without obligation, the places where we will be welcomed for showing up and not judged when we don’t. Community is where the wider sharing happens: it all balances out in the end, but sometimes it takes a while and we might not notice it happening: the apples we bring may be converted into cider and swapped for potatoes that are baked into pies that are exchanged for a piece of cloth that is sewn into a dress that is exchanged for a poem that finally finds its way back to us.
Community is a big word. Tribe is a more laden one still. But in a life well-lived, we will find our community, our tribe, the bunch of folks that we like to hang out with now and then, who we will help as and when, who will have our back when we need it most, but perhaps only then.
In true community, people do what they can and take what they need. No more, no less. In true community we simply give a portion of our wealth, our self, our ability, skills, knowledge, our whatever-it-is for no other reason than that we can.
And in true community, we feel no shame for taking what we need, in times of such need.
Community, commonality, exchange.
Define your own community. It does not have to be on your home acres, or among your work partners. Maybe you are a nomad, and your community is a melange of the places you regularly visit.
I’m still finding my way, but I have a writing community (only some of whom I have met), a swimming community, a book-reading community, the beginnings of a spiritual community. These are not entirely separate. Envisage one of those Venn diagrams you vaguely remember from maths lessons.
I have dipped my toes into others and found I did not belong. That too is part of finding the recipe. Getting burnt. Coming up soggy. And others felt right for a while, but then became bland or stale. That too, is part of finding the right mix. - Claim for yourself a Garden. A park. An allotment. A bus-stop or train station planting. A tree on a city street. A window box. Greenness matters in our lives, create it, search it out, breathe it in. It is necessary to our spiritual well-being. It is connection. When I lived in a bedsit, one of my favourite things was to walk the suburban streets enjoying other people’s gardens. Now I have one of my own, that needs so much work, I almost envy my younger self who got most of the pleasure and absolutely none of the work.
Almost. I am learning that part of the point of a garden is the work. The putting your hands not just on the earth but into it. And the patience needed to see it flourish.
I’m writing at the end of a very wet March, and my own garden is soggy and sulking under still grey skies – but there are patches of blue at my feet, if not above my head. The forget-me-nots remind me of an upcoming anniversary. The grape hyacinth have adopted their new spot with abandon. And if I want for sunshine, the forsythia smiles in all her joy.
Dig a garden. Or let it grow wild. Or find one where someone will do the work for you. But find one. One where you can sit out early and late. One where you can write early morning journals, and late-night mystery stories. One where you can get some sun on your skin and retire to the shade. One where local living things might scamper through. Or flit. Or come to feed.
Grow food – or forage for it. Grow flowers – and let weeds surprise you.
A garden is the thing that makes us remember we are not outside of nature. And if we are part of this magnificent universality then surely we will love it and protect it, and surely it will nurture us in return. - These are all home comforts but my personal recipe for my good life, needs a side order of Public Transport. Long ago I failed to learn to drive. I chose not to continue trying to learn, but before that I failed. Repeatedly. I would love to claim self-righteous, ethical, earth-centred choice, but no. A simple mixture of incompetence and fear will have to stand in for that.
Not being able to drive and wanting to go everywhere is one of my many contradictory aspects. I rely on trains and boats and planes. And buses. And taxis. And the occasional friend or stranger who kindly offers me a lift. Another reason I make no ethical claims about not driving is that I happily ride with those who do.
On the other hand, mine is still one less vehicle that might have been on the road. Mine is still one more vote and voice to try to keep our public transport network viable. It matters to me, but it matters more to others who have less choice than I do. Those who live more remotely, those who have no choice about whether or not they (learn to) drive, those who cannot afford to run a vehicle even if they have a licence to drive one, those…and those…and those…
As the network shrinks so do the lives of many people, and with them, the communities that might thrive. Children too, rely on buses and trains. And young adults. And the elderly. And the sick.
Buses and trains matter to me because they make my life easier. To others they make life possible. They make community possible. They enable good lives to be lived, and good places to survive.
It seems to me that when we write our recipe for a good life, we should maybe think beyond our own life. I feel that our transport access is part of the container in which we bake our life-cake. Its shape can expand or distort what we would do by choice – but again, that ‘changed’ (better word than ‘distorted’) shape might turn out more beautiful than we had in mind.
One thing I love (mostly!) about working all of my adventures around whether, if and how I might get there (without paying exorbitant sums for a private driver – get real) – is that it does lead to random choices. And I love a bit of random in my life.
It also brings me back to maps and compasses and measuring distances and REALLY
thinking about what is feasible. The absolute need to plan any trip beyond the regular ones brings back in a sense of anticipation, a sense of adventure.
It is also an ongoing life lesson in patience and organisation – and on the occasions I get it really, badly, wrong, in how to think on my feet and be flexible and try to remember where I packed the ‘sense of humour powder’, but as long as there are options, I’ll find a way. As much as I am working towards a simpler, quieter, way of being, I am still the itchy-footed, curious creature my Dad brought me up to be. I still want to go look, smell, taste and touch it all for myself, to hear first hand the lessons of the world. - “Where is God in all of this?” someone asked.
Nowhere. And everywhere.
Somewhere along the line, I figured out that whether I believe in “God” (or any permutation thereof) doesn’t really matter. I am a spiritual being. I think in terms of Mother Earth and sometimes I call her Gaia, and whether the earth has a benevolent personification or is an indifferent ball of rock, rolling around in space doesn’t matter. I think in terms of Spirit, who I sometimes call ‘Universe’, and whether there is such a power or it is merely a figment of my imagination doesn’t matter. I think about energy fields and crystals and chakras and chi and resonance and prayer and gratitude and interconnectedness, and whether I am right or wrong about any of that doesn’t matter.
What matters is that thinking this way, helps me to be a more loving person, a kinder person, a more intuitive, more creative, more curious, more contented person. And that really DOES matter.
So there is it. My recipe for one kind of “good” life. But you go make up your own.
The cake that we bake when we do this is called Fulfilment. It is OUR life, lived OUR way, to the best of our imperfect beautifully human capacity, capability and imaginative creativity.
So go mix it up your way. And Enjoy.
P.S. Someone is whispering in my ear. What about Wealth? Sorry, what? What have you not understood about the recipe? Wealth is simple abundance (with a nod to Sarah Ban Breathnach). True wealth is: Love, Luck, Laughter, relatively good Health and the presence of mind to work within it, Home, Sanctuary, Fun and Friends and Family, Hermit time, Sanctity, Community, Tribal belonging, Garden space, Nature space, food and flowers and weeds and birds and scampering things and insects and other animals, the ability to move from one place to another, to explore, to adventure, to be curious and follow our noses, to recognise our spiritual path when we stumble onto it and having the courage to follow where it leads.
And in all of that, I count myself very wealthy indeed.
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