Make Life Happen
One of the most important things I’ve read in the past couple years came from the most horribly named book I have ever purchased. Make Every Man Want You by Marie Forleo. I have no idea how I originally came across this book… but it is fabulous and I have appropriately renamed it (with a sharpie and masking tape): How to Make Yourself Happy.
Page 37, Chapter 2, Truth 3: Life Is Now – This Is It.
For many years, what I failed to realize was that right now is all you ever have. This moment is really it. Rather than fully investing and engaging in my life exactly as it was, I spent most of my time complaining, planning, scheming, hoping and wishing for things to be different someday. I kept journals, did affirmations and set goals so that things would get better at some point in the future. Here’s the key point I missed: inadvertently, I was training myself to lead a life of mediocrity. Life is now. Life can only be now.
Right now my life is kind of hectic. I’m at the start of Creative Spark’s second year of business and working nearly full time as a Marketing Coordinator for a contract client. Days tend to get away from me. When days begin to get away from me I find myself thinking of all the goals and the plans and how tomorrow, I’ll get to them. Tomorrow, I’ll workout harder and eat better. Tomorrow, I’ll stay on top of my workload and have time for the things that really matter. But when tomorrow comes? Yep, the same thing happens.
So instead of “complaining, planning, scheming, hoping and wishing” for things to change or envisioning a better tomorrow, I am making things happen NOW. After a long work day when I’m feeling drained I read the excerpt above and I refocus. What really matters? What can I do RIGHT NOW to make that happen?
I go to the gym or I work on my reading. I take out my sketchbook and I start on my daily creativity. I work on my legacy project. I DO SOMETHING. Something other than think about what I should be doing or endlessly searching the world for some nugget of inspiration or some magic formula that will make it all work out. No one is going to do it for me.
I’ve decided to read this book again for this week’s book… and I’ve already come across another great nugget:
Make is-ness your business.
By being in the here and now and focusing on life as it IS, rather than as we wish it would be, we free ourselves from a great deal of suffering. We are able to take action and make change happen instead of losing ourselves in the misery of what it “should” be.
Most importantly, I don’t want to wake up five miserable years from now and wonder where all the time went. I want to wake up and think back to these days as the pivotal shift in my life that lead me to greatness.
Time to go make some more life happen! What can you do right now?
