Your life is like a painting. You start with a blank canvas with no meaning, and as you progress through life, you add to that canvas – the canvas of your life. Daily, you add the colors that you choose to the canvas – you create, paint, and add meaning to that canvas. You can’t change the canvas, only the paint on it. And at the end of your life, your painting is finished.
The meaning of the painting is relevant to you and a few select others who can understand it within the context of your life. So, as you go through life, many people only see part of the painting. You can see their reactions, and they influence how you paint. Throw all the paint on it that you can — and paint over areas you want to change. You, as the painter, change over time, learning from how you painted earlier in life. When you paint on your canvas, paint with meaning so that it will be interpreted as you intended.
Life is all about a journey and how you paint your canvas. Do you want to get better at something but feel like you will never be successful? Are you scared that it will not be worth it ultimately in the end? Or are you fearful that someone will be better than you? Stop that defeatist thinking and just start. Take your journey one day at a time, so you will feel more and more alive each time you experience the slightest movement forward. That forward momentum, that painting you’re adding to your canvas, is making you become fully alive.
Perhaps you end up going on auto-pilot at times – waking up, going to work, coming home, eating dinner, going to bed, and then repeating. You want to get off autopilot and become fully alive. You want to change and get that spark back into your life. The key is to be rooted in the present and the ability to live in the now. Examine everything you do in a day and identify activities that give your brain instant gratification. Every time you think about doing one of these activities, ask yourself if it’s worth spending your happiness on.
Refrain from instant gratification so that when your activity is truly meaningful, your experience will make you feel lively and create genuine enjoyment. For example, if you start to scroll TikTok, pause and change direction. Realize that scrolling TikTok is borrowing happiness and satisfaction from your future self. Refraining from instant gratification will create more pleasure and fulfillment from activities that truly matter – like working out, doing cardio, engaging in another hobby, etc.
If you feel like you are not fully alive, you may have a disconnect deep down between what you know you should be spending time on versus what you are actually spending time on. Returning…
