We’ve been in the van for over a year now. It’s New Year’s Day & we’re in Crete. Definitely working at living our best lives is paying off, which has me thinking about what ‘living your best life’ means. Ten years ago we started out as freelancers, the kids were younger, and we lived in a small town in north Wales – Mold. Living our best lives then meant being stitched into our local community and I volunteered or worked on all sorts of community projects that included event management, planting community orchards and community consultations. We set up a regular evening of spoken word & music that promoted both English & Welsh language arts (it ran for 5 years). I was wholly committed to community life and felt so happy being part of something bigger in this way. I suppose what I’m saying is that ‘living your best life’ is whatever is good for you at that time. I feel frustrated with the ways in which we pigeonhole people so that if they are good at something then it’s the only capacity in which they ‘should’ work all their lives. How dull. How reductive. The pendulum swings and if we’re not prepared to ride that change we’ll slowly wither inside. Communities need new people with new ideas coming in to prevent stagnation, and the space for them to do so. People also need the freedom to evolve and grow both within and without a community. Living your best life doesn’t have to be about travelling the world, especially if you don’t have the capacity to do that just now. We are all creators of our universe and the act of creation is rooted in ‘the now’, not in five years or ‘when I quit this job’. True creation means being present in the life we have and making every moment of that as beautiful as we can, even if all we can manage that day is the time to make a simple meal or take a short walk and stand to admire a tree. These are radical acts of creation that we can build on, one day at a time, so that when the time comes to uproot and travel the world (or whatever the calling is) no one and nothing will stop this new direction because a life spent in the pursuit of creation will invariably lead to the knowledge that you are always living your best life.
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