Making a life

The fireflies have appeared and flowers on the trumpet vine have blossomed. (I know they’re invasive, but they’re so beautiful, and they’re taking over the yard, and the blooms attract hummingbirds. Such is the yin and yang of life.)

Monday morning it was a refreshing 55 degrees as I surveyed my wild green yard.

What a difference two nights of regular sleep make. That and a leisurely walk with the dog, a return to bullet journaling and giving myself checkmarks for 15 minutes chunks of time spent cleaning and/or organizing my living space.

I’m beginning to feel human again, even hopeful that there might be better days ahead than the ones currently confining and defining my existence.

This morning I watched Jennifer Louden‘s Monday video at The Writers Oasis. Perhaps because of the different head space I was in, these words of hers gobsmacked me: “I love the way I’m making my life.”

Simple enough. The concept is simple.

Jen talked about pleasure (desire) and freedom and choice — that we are free to choose how we react to things in our life and we choose what to add to our life. As Jen said, she decides what to read, how she will react to the wind in the trees, how she creates a life with her husband and with her dog. She decides how to spend her time and what she focuses on.

None of this is new to me; not really. We are always being told that we alone are responsible for our choices. But today it struck me differently. There’s something about the words “making a life” and “choosing my life” and even “loving the life I am making” that resonated.

I often hear “create your life,” and it could be argued they’re the same. But for me, making my life is a different thing.

Making means building, taking individual components and piecing them together to design and craft the whole. It’s active in a hands-on sense that creating doesn’t get to for me. Maybe it’s that “create your life” is overused. It’s a nuance for sure.

Here’s what I know: For the first time in a long while I felt it was possible to love this life I’m making, and in doing so to love the process of making it.

Jen inspired me to be more intentional about the decisions I make and putting my attention on what I want rather than what I need (or think I need). The latter feels small and grasping; the former as wide open as the sky.