Good Life Project - A Good Life is a Practice, Not a Place.

Episode Date: November 10, 2016

So often, we look at life as a game to win, or a journey to get from where we are now to that magical, far-off destination where, finally, we get to live a good life. Except, it doesn’t work that way. There is no there there, there is only here now. When we look at […]The post A Good Life is a Practice, Not a Place. appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So what if you could take the wisdom from years of conversations like this, distill it into a single short and sweet operating manual that gave you something to do every day in order to move from where you are to living a lit up life. That's what I've created with my new book, How to Live a Good Life, appropriately titled I hope. It's really, it's an operating manual that draws from literally thousands of hours of research, hundreds, actually, maybe even thousands now of hours of learning and sitting at the feet

of astonishing teachers and traveling the world to create something simple, a beautiful, simple model and something to do every single day for you to make a really big difference in your lives. If you want to check it out, go to goodlifeproject.com book. You can read the first chapter completely for free. And then it is available for purchase at booksellers all over the place. You can find a link in the show notes as well. On to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan back with A Good Life Project Rift. These are short and sweet thoughts, generally about a particular topic, a conversation, an idea that I've been pondering or maybe heard in conversation or maybe been asked about. Sometimes these are based on questions that I get on a pretty regular basis from you,

my awesome community of listeners. By the way, if you ever want to send questions like that over to me, you can find me pretty much all over the place on social media. Or if it's easier, just go ahead and shoot the question over to support at goodlifeproject.com and that will land on my desk at some point. So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about one particular idea. We have this thing called the Good Life Project Living Creed. It's a set of 35 or so ideas that

I shared about what's important in life a couple years ago when we were really in the early stages of forming this thing called Good Life Project. And one of the lines, one of my sacred beliefs that's shared in that creed is this. A good life isn't a place at which you arrive. It's a lens through which you see and create your world. And the bigger idea here is that we tend to see a good life, or some people will call it the good life. The Stoics would call it the good life, as this end point, you know, a point B to your point A. It's the thing that we work to get to or to achieve in life, right? And then we kind of define that. Here's what the point is, you know, it's X dollars in the bank. It's living in this

place. It's being with this partner. It's X many kids and pets and beings. It's X type of job. It's all these things, right? So we try and create that picture. 10 years out, this is three years out, five years out. This is the good life. And a good life is this point at which we're going to arrive. And our job, our job on the planet is to move from where we are now, point A, to that other point. We are here to move there as quickly and efficiently as we possibly can. Right? And that's our job. That's what we're here to do. A good life is that place there. And one day, if we do all the work

and we're really good at what we do, we're gonna get there. We will arrive at that place that we call a good life. Problem is, it's a complete fiction. It's a complete fiction. A, there is no there there. There is no point at which you just magically arrive and all of a sudden, everything that you dreamed of being good is good. And even

if you were able to define all of these things that you think will make up a good life, and then you work to achieve every single one of them as productively and efficiently as you can, and 10 years later, you arrive at that magically place where everything that was on your vision board and your list that you said and thought would be your good life, you've gotten what you will find inevitably and invariably is that you get to that place and you don't feel the way you thought you would feel. And if you ask somebody, you know, who's gotten there, you know, well, is it enough? Their answer will be just a little bit more, or just a little bit to the left, or just a little bit to the right, or I don't feel anything like I thought I'd feel. In fact, this isn't good at all.

And yet I've just sacrificed 10 years to move to this place as efficiently and productively as I can without regard to the fact that within those 10 years, the space for grace, for joy, for connection, for elevation, for profound meaning, for vitality. I've given up. I have sacrificed so much in the name of getting here. And yet, now that I'm here, there's no there there. It's not what I thought it would be. This is not the good life. This is not my good life. The truth is, we don't know what that's going to look like five years, 10 years, 20 years, a lifetime from now. All we know is how we feel and what we think might work for us. And the only way to actually go through life is to just keep running a series of experiments and projects.

And the good news is that your good life can actually be lived at every moment along the way, should you choose to own the fact that the process, the experiments, the moments, each step along this story that we're telling, within that moment, within that step, lies the opportunity for all of these things. Not then, not when we arrive, but now. For connection, for deep and profound relationships, for belly laughs, for lightness, for connection, for deep and profound relationships, for belly laughs, for lightness, for joy, for energy that is abundant in your body, for deep meaning, for the feelings of being fully

expressed, for the process of discovery and curiosity. Those are all things that we can experience in the here and now. And if we look at it as more saying, our job is to put on the lens of living a good life now, is to open to possibility, to deepen into every occurrence, every invitation, to run a series of experiments, all because we just want to experience these things along the way and learn more, then we get to actually live that good life

in bits and pieces every day. And if someday arises where we finally get to a point where we say to ourselves, this is a good life, there's a really good chance that that point is just going to be a reflection of a whole series of points that we've lived along the way that are also equally filled with the experience of saying, yeah, this was a good day. This was a day that mattered.

It was a day where I feel connected and alive and lit up and nourished. And even the days where I don't feel like that, that's okay. That doesn't mean that this life, even on my worst day, isn't good. So rather than saying, okay, a good life is a play chat, which someday I will arrive, do a reset, right? Think to yourself, no, no, no, no. This is about the practice of living, not about getting to a place of finally living.

This is about the practice of doing little things every day that allow you to feel alive in the here and now, along the way. There is no there there. The only there there is here now. Something to think about. Something I think about on a pretty regular basis because I can get a little bit, a little bit future oriented. Okay, so maybe a lot of bit future oriented. Okay. So maybe a lot of it future oriented at trying to project the future and project how I think I'll feel if and when I do something and then work maniacally to make it happen and then get there and realize, huh, well, I don't feel the way I thought I would feel. So as many of these riffs are,

it's not just answering questions I've had, but it's personal to me because I've been doing a bit of a reset on these ideas for the last probably five years or so. And it's moving the needle. It's making a difference. Play with it. Explore it. Have conversations around it. I hope, as always, you've enjoyed this provocation.

And I'll be back next week with another for you. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.