Mick Silva Editing

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard said, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

How did you spend your day today?

Did it fill you? Kierkegaard said our greatest source of unhappiness is our decision to be too busy–though we often refuse to see that as a choice. Are you like me and want to choose to live in the present of NOW and be infinitely more rewarded than the myriad productivity gurus will ever accomplish?

Start here. Let go of worry about being productive and just be. The surest way to miss your life is to let default busyness steal it. Put your feet up and savor this: our collective addiction is feeling loved. Our greatest distraction from truly living is coasting through life, day after unlived day. We may manage to show up for our obligations (for a while) but remain completely unaware of our deeper selves, cut off from our higher purpose.

We’ve got to stop mistaking all we’re doing for all we already are.

We may live longer than ever, but the struggle to truly live is more urgent than ever. Go back to Seneca. Roman philosopher and oft-quoted thinker wrote  about it 2000 years ago:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.” – On the Shortness of Life

The question is, will we listen and learn how to use it?

Find inspiration on this in my Morning Motivation this week.

^{Thanks to Maria Popova of BrainPickings for this great find.}