I would like to attempt to answer this question
“what has my life been about?”
The first well formed answer to this that came to my mind was
my life has been about collecting things… people, places, tastes, memories, feelings specifically things that make me feel good happy joyful wistful nostalgic grateful awe-inspired, ideas, values, principles, teachers, codes for living, books but what are books but another avenue for these, abilities, skills, friends, lovers, more and more reasons for the question underlying all other questions “why is it better to live this life than to be dead!?”
and I think its largely true.
I feel that i have a very good answer, a meaningful answer, for the question of why should I be alive in the first place:
My life feels like a fucking art work!
This is a new perspective for me to inhabit.
I was dormant, uncertain, hurt, scared for a long time. It took me a… long time to find my feet and to steady myself.
One day I found that I had broken the shackles of an immense burden that I had been carrying for most of my life. And suddenly I found myself falling in love with the world. A world I thought I had known but that I was rediscovering.
And then, slowly, I started to build the kind of life I had always wanted. But to do that I also had to figure out who I was and what I valued and what my tastes were and what I liked and what I didn’t like and who I liked and who I wanted around me and who I didn’t. and maybe sometimes why. but the why doesn’t really matter all that much.
And there were garden paths along the way that I got lost in. But wondering through them I nevertheless learned a great deal about myself.
After finding my feet I soon learned that there was another thing that I needed to do that I didn’t quite know how to do even though I did want to. And that was to Find my voice.
See I needed to speak. I needed to tell the world and the people in it, what I felt and what I wanted. The world, no, life, was happening to me. But I didn’t always like what was happening. Or where I found myself. Or the patterns that I was stuck in day to day. And I didn’t know how to get out of that. Because I didn’t know how to speak. You may say: Speak? Don’t you mean act? life is about action. Yes. But speaking is an act. The first act. Words are spells after all. They are the greatest force that I have found for reshaping my world. Actions come after speaking the words to invoke those actions. Not in all cases but certainly in those with great weight, it is not meaningful to me to carry out actions that I haven’t spoken the words for. Words are a form of respect preceding action.
But speaking is hard. Saying words is easy. Saying words that can change your life are hard. I remember hearing somewhere that at any given time you are only a few words away from completely changing your life. Your job, your relationships, where you live, how free you are, how much of any given experience you want more of in your life.
Once I learned how to speak I realised I could turn my life into whatever I wanted. And then I started doing that.