What Does a "Life Well Lived" Really Mean?

I'm Lisa 👋 Welcome to the latest edition of Stream of Consciousness!

Subscribe to join others who want to live more consciously (read: not on autopilot).

Hey 👋

I’m writing this now because it’s been something I’ve been thinking about lately.

I’m in the process of restructuring my life, body, mind, routines, etc. etc. etc. as you may have gathered by some of the topics I write about.

I have realized that I have forced way too many things in my life and I am now paying the price. And I don’t want to keep incurring the debt of misalignment.

I feel like I’ve lived 10 lives in one even though I’m only in my 30s.

I now have a loooong list of what not to do and what doesn’t work. I feel like I am so stubborn that the universe had to back me against the wall to really have me FEEL what misaligned feels like to know where the boundary is so I can go in the opposite direction.

A lot of these lessons have my wheels spinning to try to define what “a life well lived” actually means. Maybe in general. Maybe…just for me?

I think I’ve learned enough about myself by this point to know that a lot of the things that make other people happy don’t seem to make me happy, and the inverse is true as well.

I think for me, my current running list looks like this:

1. Freedom

2. Connection

3. Authenticity

4. Empathy

5. Intention

Freedom

Spending years at a time feeling trapped has made me realize that one of my most crucial core values is freedom.

Freedom to be flexible and have the capacity to adapt and learn and grow.

Location freedom: Freedom to explore and wander and travel.

Time freedom: Freedom to organize my day to help nurture meeting my needs and best support myself.

Movement freedom: The ability to have a large movement capacity and robustness and explore within that great capacity.

Connection

I’ve also dealt with a lot in my life that caused me to be extremely isolated - both physically, location-wise with minimal support systems close by and emotionally isolated - like the feeling when you’re in a big group but feel very lonely and like you can’t relate to the people around you.

I have really struggled with the latter especially because I think the way I have lived and the way I make decisions and the way my brain works is and always has been divergent from the norm. It often feels like a lot of my life experiences are very difficult for anyone to relate to, and at the same time, these experiences make it hard for me to relate to others, especially in my age group. For example, what I share here with you goes through a bit of a “can people relate to this?” filter before I decide what to write about.

I’m self-aware enough to know that my brand of weird doesn’t always land. And now I think that’s something I’m totally okay with. (See “Authenticity” below).

I want to form authentic connections with people who have similar values, who make me feel energized during and after I interact with them, and who make me feel excited about life. I want to have people around me who I am excited to share life with - not just the good things but also the messy and confusing things - and have a safe space to be able to hold this connection.

Where I’m at right now, it feels very difficult for me to engage in small talk. When I meet people, I genuinely want to connect with them. I don’t know if it’s a years of therapy thing or an awareness thing or a “lived through several near death experiences” kind of thing but I just can’t. I feel my own energy change when I feel like I’m being superficial and I don’t like the me I am when that happens. I know that’s not for everyone, and that’s absolutely okay. I also know this is related to trust and trauma - it’s actually a really good thing to build a trust rapport with someone after repeated engagements in order to feel safe enough to be vulnerable and open and have deep conversations.

I’m learning to find a better balance between being too closed or too open. And to read the signals my nervous system gives me to understand when to be open and when to protect.

Authenticity

When I was a kid, I was just myself, always.

Somewhere along the way, this got lost…and so did I.

I was a tomboy with a mushroom cut and a rat tail. I didn’t care if my clothes matched. I loved being ferrel and spending my time outside running around, biking in the forest, finding bugs, and running my own mini science experiments like taking foods from the fridge and creating cultures to see which ones grew mould, what it looked like, how long it took to form, etc. I made friends by asking kids if I could play with them if I was naturally drawn to something that was happening - like playing mini sticks or skipping - and didn’t think twice about it. I was the only girl on my hockey team and I didn’t even really realize because I was having so much fun.

But when you get to a certain age and socialization is engrained in you, it can be hugely disruptive to what would have been one’s natural, innate expression of themselves.

I knew I was gay in high school but I did not feel I was in a safe place (Catholic school, Catholic church, etc.) in the early 2000s (when it was very much not okay to be gay) to be able to tell anyone about it so I kept it hidden until the middle of university.

I knew I was experiencing pain while training for and playing high level sports - but I was brought up in “no pain, no gain” environments and I just thought, “Well, everyone else is feeling like I am and they’re doing it” so I pushed myself to.

Every time I ignored the voice inside of me, I died a little bit. And so did my authenticity.

I’ve been really working at this to make sure I don’t suppress that inner voice and give it space to express itself. And create the space for me to listen.

And every time I listen, even though it’s often really scary, something positive turns up in my life.

I want to live authentically to fully express myself and also be 100% me when I’m with other people and form connections from a more aligned place.

Empathy

I used to work as a journalist and stopped for a number of reasons, but one of them was that I found it very hard to detach myself from what was happening in the news and how it made me feel. Every time I had to do a sweep of “what’s happening in the world?”, I took on the energy of the attention-grabbing, negativity-biased headlines.

I thought something was wrong with me.

It turns out I’m just a highly sensitive person and have a lot of empathy.

Rather than turn my head and ignore things that are going on, I want to be the kind of person who can feel deeply with boundaries.

I want to care about people.

I want to care about how people feel and how that makes me feel and how I make them feel.

I want to care about other people’s experiences and sometimes feel them as if they were my own so I can use that as data - to connect, to take action, to solve a problem, etc.

I don’t think the answer is to live in a bubble - I think the answer is to figure out how to use my sensitivity as a tool and treat it like one - a tool that needs consistent sharpening, a tool that needs breaks, and a tool that needs sufficient energy to use.

Intention

I can’t tell you about the number of times I have seen posts and IG reels about meaning and purpose.

Both of these feel too abstract and big for me - you can make up your own meaning but then realize after X unexpected life experience that you have found a new meaning. You can say your purpose is to build a unicorn company, to revolutionize X,Y,Z, or leave ___ type of impact on the world, but to me those always feel quite grandiose and self-manufactured.

I think a life well lived is intentional.

I want to be able to think about where I’m putting my energy, my time, and who I’m connecting with.

I want to focus on areas that help me feel expansive vs. contracted.

I want to intentionally explore to find out who I am, what makes me tick, and what I’m really made of at the core.

To me, intent is everything.

What does “a life well lived” mean to you?

This is my current running list - what does yours look like?

FWIW I found this thread on Reddit and it’s got a ton of different perspectives - here are some of my favourite nuggets:

Stuff That Stuck With Me Recently 🫠

1. You Can Just Do Things - A post by Justin Welsh

2. Foundations of Health - A book by Eric Goodman

3. What if you don’t love your body because you don’t trust it? - An IG post by Bam Lionheart (read the caption)

Thanks for reading!

I hope that you enjoyed this post and it inspired you to think slightly differently about how you define what a life well lived means to you.

Thank you for supporting me, for following along, for emailing me, and sharing your thoughts and ideas 🙏

Always open to your feedback on each edition - it helps me feel less like a robot behind a glass wall.

Here’s to navigating life off of autopilot together.

Lisa ✌️