Pay attention. Tell about it.

Taking notice of our lives.

As I get older, I’ve been contemplating what it means to live a satisfactory life. Not a big, bold, audacious life driven by ambition and the need to succeed and acquire more, but a simple, satisfactory life filled with quiet and small joys, and personal achievements that may not come with public praise or acknowledgement.

I would have railed against this kind of life in my younger years. As a lonely, traumatised child who had no control over her life or a voice that could be used to speak up for (and defend) herself, I left home as soon as I could and set my sights on achievement and success at all costs.

Back then, achievement and success meant climbing the ladder and acquiring beautiful things. It meant being a workaholic, burning through my nervous system, my relationships, and my bank account—burning through my life, driven by fear and pain, masquerading as ambition. Of course, eventually, it all came crashing down around me, and I was forced to face my fear, my pain, and my shame.

This is how I learnt to pay attention.

Now, I’m not advocating total burnout as the only way to start paying attention to your life. But adverse circumstances often provide a doorway for us to finally take a good look at ourselves, pay attention to who we have become, to the life we have created, and decide whether that’s the life we want or the person we want to be.

This doesn’t happen overnight—or at least it hasn’t for me. It’s a long, slow unfolding. Layer upon layer gets buffeted away—sometimes gently, like a soft washcloth removing the dust and debris of the day. Other times, it’s an altogether rougher experience, like a slap to the face or a shove to the ground. Either way, I’ve learnt to let it happen. Resistance only causes more grief.

Even if you achieve the long list of things that society deems “successful,” if you don’t work on your inner self and heal (at least the more painful of) your emotional wounds, this kind of success can feel empty. It becomes the fuel that fires perfectionism and the never-ending cycle of needing ‘more.’ Breaking the cycle requires us to wake up. Not to fix ourselves or become some perfect, idealised version of ourselves, but to wake up to the life we want to live and the person we want to be.

Any change we want to make in our lives requires us to go inward. There is a great quote by Elizabeth Gilbert in Big Magic where she says, “I’ve never seen any life transformation that didn’t begin with the person in question finally getting tired of their bullshit.” This pretty much sums it up. We can only begin to change when we release our attachment to our old tropes and storylines. When we decide that we’re ready to sit down and start paying attention. When we recognise our addiction to distraction as a way of avoiding our inner work. When we’re ready to ask ourselves some big, important questions and give ourselves the space to find our own answers.

What might we crack open in our lives, in ourselves, if we learned to pay attention?

Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell me about it.*

(*with thanks to Mary Oliver)

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