Stop Trying to Live Your Best Life
I was talking to a friend a few days ago, and he told me that 2021 was going to be the year he would finally “live his best life.” It made me stop for a minute and think about the phrase. My friend explained how he lived as a shadow and in a rut for the past 53 years of his life, and 2021 was going to be his year of being the best version of himself. My brain kind of stopped a bit, and the audacity of that sentence rattled my brain as I mumbled under my breath,
“What the hell is “the best life?”
I continued to smile, nodded my head, and didn’t tell my friend what I was thinking.
I had used that phrase many times myself when I wrote my first book. But now, all these years later, hearing it from a friend made me want to scream. Maybe it was me getting older or just the fact that I knew this friend had a great life and worked hard to help others.
It got me thinking about life in general. The simple definition of life is from the time we are born till the day our soul leaves the body. Is there a best and worst life? Or a good or bad one? Every person lives life with ups, downs, joys, sorrows, milestones, hurdles, etc., that cause reflection and learning. I was born in a family that valued relationships, and my parents cared about me as a child; was that me living my best life as a toddler? I got to do all sorts of cool things in my life, like traveling to exotic faraway places; were those two weeks of traveling my best life? But once I got back, I started my “not-so-good life?”
I mean, who’s to say what is my best life?
Do people living their best not feel sad, anxious, get depressed, or suicidal? Do they not cry or frown?
According to Ralph Waldo Emmerson, “All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make, the better.”
According to him, the more we live, the better our life becomes.
“ The mere sense of living is joy enough.” — Emily Dickinson.
Dickinson believed that joy is in living; she doesn’t talk about the best or worst life, but instead, the ecstasy of life lies in living it.
So my theory is this: most of us are doing our best-trying to live life the finest way that we can with the circumstances…
