Last night I had a discussion with someone who confided in me that their life feels “empty”:
Everything feels so transient and impermanent — jobs, relationships, etc — and you can’t count on anything working out with certainty, so it feels exhausting to invest emotionally into anything. Meanwhile, some other people seem to have it so much better, and things keep working out for them.
Many of us are guilty of treating every moment of our lives as something we need to get through to get to some future moment which we deem more important.
Wake up in the morning to get ready, to get to work, to make money, to have this or that, to feel happy and fulfilled in the future.
It’s like walking down a familiar street trying to get to your destination — the entire lifetime you spend walking up and down that street goes “empty” — a blank in your memory.
You’re effectively living in the corridor of your life. Instead of being fully “present” (I don’t like this word) and attentive (I prefer this word) inside the room you find yourself in, you reject the room and focus on walking through the door through to the next.
So what can we do?
We have to become the actors of our lives.
When an actor is doing a scene, their job is to fully immerse themselves in that act and treat whatever they’re doing as the only thing that matters in existence.
Only that scene matters. They need to fully step into their character and embody their experience in the moment. Love scene, angry scene, tragic scene, funny scene, sex scene — whatever emotions it calls for, the actor has to do justice to it. Even if it’s all fake and meaningless.
Being the actor of your life means that when you’re in a scene, no matter how trivial it may be, place your full attention on being in it!
Nothing else matters. It may be setting you up for a future scene, but your attention needs to be on what’s in front of you.
Recall the presence and immersion you felt whenever you wrote an exam in school. You studying hard for days, allowing yourself to stress over it. And when you found yourself in the examination hall, for a brief moment, you made it the singular purpose of your life.
In the grand scheme of things, that exam was nothing. You don’t even remember it.
But you were there. You acted your part fully.
That’s how I wish to spend every hour of my life if I can:
Do hard things, go after hard challenges, and enjoy the heck out of the process. Fully experience every emotion, good or bad, and put your attention to what’s in the moment.
