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What If We Have Life Backwards?
Adulthood has become optimized for survival instead of aliveness.
The other day, while mentally preparing myself to start a new teaching job, I noticed something strange happening inside me. Even before the work had begun, my mind had already started reorganizing my entire life around it. I was automatically treating my writing, music, workshops, and creative projects as things I would now have to carefully “fit in” around work whenever I had extra time left over. And the moment I started thinking that way, my body immediately felt heavy.
When did the things that make us feel alive become secondary to the things that help us survive?
The strange thing is, when I look back at the periods where I felt most emotionally healthy, they were never periods where I was working nonstop. They were periods where life had texture. A few hours of work. Then writing in a café. Choir rehearsal at night. Random conversations that turned into article ideas. Music playing while cooking dinner. A workshop over the weekend. A painting sitting unfinished in the corner of my room. The richness of life never came from doing one thing repeatedly for eight hours a day. It came from moving between different emotional worlds throughout the day.
