Life can be beautiful all the time.
This is both 100% true and total BS, depending on what you think that statement means.
And if you get it wrong, you’re going to be miserable.
That was the short version.
The longer version goes like this: I see a lot of ‘success gurus’ out there. People whose day job is helping you to achieve greatness.
Almost to a man (and a few ladies), their story goes something like, “I was poor, living in my parent’s garage, eating 2-minute noodles and saw-dust. And then I thought, I’m going to be a life coach.”
Seriously. Almost all of them. Even the giants in the space like Tony Robbins and Brendon Burchard (who do amazing things and are genuinely awesome, but still have this as their back story… am I the only one to see the contradiction?).
Anyway, some of the great figures aside, one of the great fibs of the industry is that you can have anything you want, if only you want it hard enough.
With the right mindset and the right intentions, your life can be beautiful.
100% true, 100% BS.
I think it is good to set your bar high, and aim for this in life. To be living a life that soaks your heart in beauty.
And I do think it’s possible. Absolutely. And I do think that it all comes down to your mindset and the power of your intentions.
HOWEVER! The lynch pin here is what we mean by beautiful.
For most people, beautiful has a very narrow definition. It points to experiences that cluster around watching dolphins play in the bay at sunset.
For me, it’s something much broader than that. It is the dolphin sunset, but it is also weeping over a stillborn calf, with placenta and muck all the way up to my elbows.
‘Beautiful’ does not describe the experience so much as it describes my relationship to the experience.
And in that ways there are many kinds of beautiful. There’s the cow gore beautiful. There’s the anxious about why my daughter is out late beautiful. There’s the up late at night with my hubby prepping for a high stakes meeting with the bank manager beautiful.
There are many, many kinds of beautiful.
If we’re asking the cosmos to give us the dolphin sunset beautiful and nothing else, then we’re asking for a very narrow experience of life. Our souls want to grow, and so I think it’s just not going to happen.
But if you’re asking for all the beautifuls, then you’re asking to embody a particular way of being – one that is grateful, open, receptive, celebratory.
If you want a beautiful life, this is where the work is. Nowhere else.
So if you anchor your heart on dolphin beautifuls, you’re going to be constantly disappointed. You will be miserable. What’s worse, you’ll miss a whole parade of beautifuls as they march through your life, simply because your on the look out for dolphins.
And what’s worse again is that you’ll probably start beating yourself up because you think your mindset is too shabby or your intentions too weak to be constantly filling your life with dolphin sunsets.
A tragedy sandwich. Don’t fall into this trap.
But if you train yourself to be a wine glass for beauty, then you will be surprised at how often the universe fills your cup.
And then, I say, it is totally true that life can be beautiful all the time.
We can all drink to that.