It's all well and good and necessary to celebrate what's great about our lives, but let's be honest if we want to move forward – and there is no one to say we must want to – but if we do, then we also have to look at what is not so great.
If we're not yet quite "living the dream" or, to be honest, even if we are, there'll be pockets of life as we know it, that we'd wish to be otherwise than they are. Things to work on. Work in progress.
"Not so great" is my preferred way to describe these areas, because, as I will continue to repeat, words matter. It is important how we label things, because that determines how we react to them, both consciously and subconsciously. I think it matters therefore that we don't talk about what's wrong with our life, merely about what's not as great as it could be.
Room for improvement. An opportunity for growth. Potential for a change of direction.
I know. The terms are so overworked these days, they're "woo-woo clichés" – but clichés exist because of the kernels of truth within them. Don't knock it.
I'm a big fan of Dr Brene Brown. If you haven't come across her yet, just google the name and then read, watch, listen to everything you can find. This woman is awesome. This woman is a living breathing example of courage in everyday life.
She is also vulnerable.
And that's her point.
Without vulnerability there can be no courage. And courage is just another word for whole-heartedness. The biggest compliment I was paid last year was "whatever you do, you do it whole-heartedly".
So when I came to write this piece, I thought I had to push through the vulnerability of putting this side of me out there, in public. There are things that I'm not comfortable about saying publicly, but if any of this exercise is to have any authenticity then I can't skip the difficult questions.
Then I had a re-think. There is a difference between skipping the difficult questions and over-sharing the answers to them. My "Rule No. 1" is Protect those you care about. I'm only just beginning to realise that I am allowed to include myself in that ring. So I sat and I answered the question in full gory detail – and I decided you really don't need to hear most of it. Like I said: work in progress. But I will share a little.
There's a whole lot about my life that's not so great. Some of it is obvious to anyone looking in from the outside: I spend too much time alone and my general lifestyle – you know: diet, exercise, sleep – could do with an upgrade. I could be better at house- and garden-work.
Not so obvious to outsiders is the degree to which I struggle to get things done. I get them done, so people think it's easy. Then when I am working myself hard to achieve, they say I push myself too hard. What goes unseen is that I have to…or I would give in to the times when I really would like to just crawl away and hide. I have seen what that does, and it is not somewhere I want to go…so I have to keep pushing and as Evan Smoak says: How you do anything, is how you do everything. People say I care too much – but it's either that or not to care at all. I make my choices – and then I care, or I don't.
Maybe that's not so great either.
When I started to write this piece, I started re-working what I'd written back in the summer. To begin with that really depressed me. Then I realised that I was approaching it all wrong. What I wrote six months ago was about how I felt then. It needed a reality check. How much of it is still true?
I realised how important it is when using this question to remember it is a present tense question. It is about what is not great, not what hasn't been great, what might not be great, but what isn't right now, today, this week, maybe this month but certainly no further ahead and certainly not yesterday, or last week, or further back.
Revisiting the question on that basis, I learned that of course there are things that are not as great as they might be, but most of them are better than they were. Most of them I am working on, or working around. One or two I am pondering just accepting.
Words are important. There is a difference between "I have my own place" and "I live alone". The first sounds like success; the second sounds like failure. The truth is I have my own place, but do I truly live alone? Of course not. I have friends, colleagues, family, teachers, fellow-students, clients, neighbours. There may be some roles unfilled at the moment, but hey, who knows? Maybe I will fill them…or maybe I'll use the space to do something else exciting.
I am beginning to see that some of the gaps in my life are not gaps, just spaces. Words are important, it matters what we call things. There is a difference between a space and a gap. A gap is a chasm to cross. A space is a place to be. Free. Spaces we can choose to fill, or not. We can leave them open to see what might step into them. Indeed we can choose to keep them open and empty, valid in their own right.
Working out what isn't so great in our lives is definitely the first step to being able to make those things great – but only if we want to. As my man was in the habit of saying: you don't must.
