How are you choosing to live your life? Are you choosing material gain, relationships, career success, family, spirituality, or something else? There are many, many things and ways you can choose to live life. A time will come when you may wish to determine what your life has been about and for what you have chosen to live. What will matter in the end?
In other words, seek to answer the question:
"What am I living my life for?"
Do you wish to live for a more significant reason or purpose? When you come to the end of life, do you want to feel complete? To have lived for something more than yourself? To have made an impact on the world?
"Be a life long or short, its completeness depends on what it was lived for." David Starr Jordan (1851-1931)
Your life is worth living for something, isn't it? Give it some thought. If you wish to clarify what you are living your life for, try the following exercise.
Exercise
With journal in hand, start each day, preferably each morning, of the next 30 days asking yourself, "What am I living my life for?" Write whatever comes to mind, whether it is a single word, a few sentences, or several paragraphs. I promise, if you do this exercise with earnestness for a full 30 days, it will give you the answer. The answer may be something you have never thought before, or it may confirm something you know to be true. Either way, the exercise will help you think deeply and discover more of what is driving you.
For me, it cleared up some things I had not fully understood and helped me realize others I had not thought possible. Overall, it provided me with a great deal of clarity on my reason for living.
As you go through this exercise each morning, do it from a mindset expressed by Caddy in the following quote:
"Do not waste time trying to overcome your weaknesses and failures. Simply raise your consciousness, transcend and free your thoughts from limitation and illusion, and find within the very center of your being a wholeness and completeness! Cease wallowing in your imperfections and never accept limitations! Aim high, and you will get there. It is only your thoughts that hold you back." Eileen Caddy (1917-2006)
Final thoughts
Don't live your life waiting until the end to attempt to determine what you are living for. Make the decision to find what will give you completeness starting immediately. You can make the time to do it if you only realize how crucial it is to having peace in your life. Added to peace will be an unequaled enjoyment of life and living!
Try the exercise. You will never regret it, and what you gain will be invaluable to you and all those you love! What more could you want from life?