That question of what one would want on their gravestone has always perplexed me. What words could succinctly sum up a life? And, then what words could sum up my life? If someone who never knew me walked over my remains in a cemetery, but read my tombstone, how could they have a sense of the essence of my life on Earth?
I’m writing today because I have an answer:
She lived life fully.
In recent years when catching up with a friend, and the friend asks “how are things?” or “how’s life?” the answer I give when things are going my definition of well is “life is being fully lived".
What does that look like? When life is being lived fully I’m experiencing reality for what it is, connecting with others, loving well and allowing myself to be loved well— and consciously expressing gratitude for all of it along the way.
A fully lived life includes grief, an indicator that we have loved someone/something.
A fully lived life includes challenges received with right effort to work through them, confidence that we have what it takes to handle hard moments with at least a trace of grace.
A fully lived life includes what many may name “failure” (not a word I use in my vocabulary). Failure is essentially things not going the way we expected; those expectations may be of ourselves, of others, or of something undefined beyond realizing after the fact that we expected something different than what happened. When living life fully failure can be expected, and therefore embraced when it comes (we never need to seek it out, it will surely arrive). And when it does we can be prepared to again greet it as a challenge and apply our right effort to move through it.
A fully lived life includes joy that we choose to feel. This one may be the most difficult of all to lean into. In our society joy is much more terrifying than things going “wrong”. Many of us refuse to experience joy— we get sh*tfaced at weddings, we ruin an amazing day with loved ones by picking a fight, we feel depressed after we reach a goal— getting a promotion at work, meeting our first child, buying a new house, getting something that we’ve always wanted. In a fully lived life it is the choice to lean into and feel that joy that is what makes the difference from a life merely being lived. It takes practice if you’re used to numbing the discomfort of joy. But, it is so worth it.
A fully lived life has so much love in it. In a fully lived life love is boundless. We can love our friends as deeply as we love the stranger who cuts us off in traffic. And our loving can extend well beyond humans— we can love plants, animals, the moon, the depths of space. We can love the paper of our books, recognizing that it was once a tree, and that tree was once a tiny seed, that with soil, sun, and rain grew up tall, and fell down small to become pulp and our paper, printed with ink that expands our mind. We can love the plastic of the picture frame that holds a favorite old photo- knowing that the plastic was once oil down deep in the Earth, that someone extracted and processed and here the core of the Earth sits so gently holding smiles of you and your beloveds. Boundless.
Living the life fully is a practice. Above all it takes awareness and gratitude. It requires that we see, feel, and experience what is and then choose to be grateful for all of it. Moments when I would not be able to answer a friend asking how it is going with “life is being fully lived” are usually when I am moving through things that seem too difficult for me to face fully. But, then I do move through them. And some momentum picks up. And again, I can affirm that life is being fully lived.
The precision of my phrase comes from a stretch of years when I was reading mostly books exploring Buddhist psychology. My first therapist had recommended Mark Epstein’s Open to Desire. I loved the book immediately. It is so full of acknowledgement and acceptance of reality and tapping into it with awareness. Which is so much what I enjoy and respect about Buddhism.
In this book Epstein shares many anecdotes about western friends and gurus in India. He tells of his friend Jack Engler meeting with a guru named Munindra, and he asks him: “Munindraji, what is the dharma?”.
Munindra answers: “Dharma is living the life fully.”
Dharma is a challenging concept to explain in words, but one can think of it as truth, or one’s own path. “Dharma talks” for example are how many yoga classes start, and will be reflections from your yoga teacher on life, and how to live it, usually with an offering for self-contemplation.
Today I am writing to you a week away from completing nine months of yoga teacher training, one month into a soul-satisfying new job, from my well-settled home. Midway through a year where I have mourned great losses and heartaches, struggled with physical illness and emotional turmoil, and realized how much growing up I still have ahead of me— and through these challenges the moments where I have chosen to show up. To love well. And to allow others to love me well (very difficult). To have needs and to choose to express them in ways they can actually be heard. To experience the needs of others and try to meet them with grace. To lean into the work of living. To be willing to work through what is, and to work on the things I have the power to change. With appreciation for all of it as I go.
How’s life right now?
Life is being fully lived.
RESOURCES
Book: Open to Desire