Playing it safe
I like to think of myself as living my best life. I do work I love, I live in a place that feels like home, I get lots of time with the important people in my life, I get outside every day, I delight in reading and traveling…
And yet somehow, the occasional wave of yearning and disappointment sneaks in when I’m not looking.
Where does that come from? If I am living my best life, what is that about?
My Seth Godin one-a-day calendar left me a big, beautiful hint last week.
Recently in my life and business planning, I found myself (only in retrospect, I didn’t catch it in the moment) shrinking my desires, and subsequent goals, based on what was realistic. Attainable. Safe.
And as author John Shedd says, “A ship is safe in a harbor, but that is not what ships are built for.”
Containing my aspirations, my visions, based on what feels “possible” limits my imagination before I even really get started. And opens the door to those sneaky feelings of yearning and disappointment that I now realize were the warning chirps of the canary in the coal mine of living small.
It’s hard to change this habit. To dream what is bigger than what feels feasible or even imaginable.
But maybe it is even harder to live your life with deep, unending yearning.
How would you rather live?
