That’s How I Know

Read Time: 7 minutes

What She Saw

After all the posts, reading, listening, traveling, talking, and just watching, I’ve seen and learned a lot that I can’t unsee. At the same time, there’s so much more to see. I really want to see all of it. It’s challenging to live a life of knowing, but questioning, understanding, but still learning, and believing, but wondering. 

I do know some things now, though, that help me keep hovering around my world (check out That Hovering Feeling for more on how I float through life) with lots of awesome realizations. How did I learn them? I’d love to tell you.

There once was a girl. A real one. She thought life might be like a fairytale, but she was wrong. She was never going to be a fairytale girl. She thought she knew, but she didn’t. She thought she could, but she couldn’t. Not yet. She thought she had to, but she didn’t. Then, she started learning. Not in school. In the world. She opted out of should and into anything else. 

This girl learned that she needed to see more, experience more, and feel more. She figured out that the world was and is brilliant. She started seeing people differently. She decided she wanted to check out tons of different ideas. She finally believed that not only could she, but she wanted to know as much and as many parts of life as life could give.

Maybe this is a familiar story. Doesn’t everyone want as much as life can give? I thought so, but now, I’m not sure. People don’t really talk about it. They talk about finding their “best life” or making the journey to a particular life, or building a successful life. But people don’t often talk about knowing life in all its possibilities with all its paradoxes, not as it could be, but as it is.

Missing

The paradox I’m so grateful to see is that I don’t want to live in a world where people keep living like they need to fill up their lives while they miss that their life is already full. People don’t talk about starting from full and adding on. They don’t talk about bonus points and building from a full and complete existence no matter where life takes them. People talk about being enough and then they keep pulling and pushing and searching because they don’t really believe their life is actually enough.

Social media personalities illustrate this best. They talk about reinventing themselves after they have told everyone they spent their last “era” finding their best life. Why would someone need to reinvent their best life? After learning how to overcome their past and “vision board” a life with everything they would ever want, why would they need a healing journey after? They’re telling us to do as they do while everyone misses their actual life trying to create a different one. 

I know that by trying to be on a healing journey or spending time finding the path to my best life, my life becomes the currency. Instead of spending that currency, I’m living knowing my life is the best journey. My healing is wrapped up in living my life. I heal by loving. I learn by moving. I’m joyful by being. So simple. So true.

Always Getting It

Like everyone else, I live in a world where situations aren’t fair, but I never think of my life or circumstances as unfair. It’s one thing to see someone else’s circumstances as not fair. That’s pretty easy. But it’s a totally different thing to go around believing my life is unfair. I really don’t see my world that way anymore. I don’t see it as empty hoping and wishing it would fill up.

Living this already full life is how I know. I know that I have been given an already made life with the rest of it so beautifully waiting out there for me. This is the ultimate knowing. I’m so grateful. Gratefulness is something I feel everyday.

Was I born into comfort? Yes. Am I blessed? Absolutely. Am I loved? Amazingly so. And I’ll NEVER need to ask for more because of it. That’s it. I don’t have to ask for more. If it all went away right now, I know how to be loved and blessed and comfortable. I’ve seen it. I get it. I’m grateful. 

I’ve watched them. I’ve watched all the people in my life. I’ve learned from them. People who actually have so much end up empty because they don’t learn or they forget. I won’t forget because I know. I’ve seen people show love to each other. I don’t have to be the one being loved to see it. All I had to do was understand that love is what I’m seeing. That’s why I don’t need more. It’s always there. 

What about the people that weren’t and aren’t so blessed? Isn’t it just easy for me to say that it’s all good? Yes. It’s easy for me. It might be harder for others. This is sad. It hurts to know that life can be lonely and difficult for people who did nothing but still find themselves in ugly places.

Some circumstances are truly ugly and horrific. To be truly grateful, I have to know this and never forget it either. I need to keep finding the ways that my life can ease the ugly for others. I never want to forget how much love and care is in the world waiting to be shared.

I can’t know what life holds for me. I might have to work through hard stuff. I might have to work really hard to survive. But, I’ve seen comfort and care and love so I know how to recreate it. I know what it looks like. I’m so grateful I can see it so I can know it. Do I know for sure that everything will work out? Yes. Everything will work out as long as I continue to remember to see the love.

My Kind

Be kind. Please. Of all the things I have written, it’s the simplest and most effective thing I have learned. Kindness is such an amazing way of giving and receiving. There was a time when I didn’t know that kindness is the ultimate foundation of a full life. But now I know that without it, no life can be open to the extra stuff. It’s what I can know when I don’t know yet. 

I don’t know everyone’s circumstances. I don’t always  understand their anger or sadness. But I can still be kind. Even when life isn’t fair to them, I can show kindness. I’m working to live in kindness more and more. It’s not an adjective. It’s an action verb. I can show it by how I approach everything in my life. I’ll never be great at it, but being good at it is really good.

I know so much. I’ll learn so much more. None of the cheesy stuff I write are popularly held opinions. I don’t follow the mantras and the affirmations. I just want to be kind to the people I love and the ones that I’ll meet so I can and add on to my already amazing life. Quietly and purposefully, I will love and care and take it all in.

I don’t imagine a world where everyone understands that humans need love more than money or time more than stuff. But I see my life that way. I like money and I enjoy stuff, but if I lost it, I would be okay. But, if through some magical undoing I lost knowing about love and joy, my foundation would be gone. So, I hold tightly to my grateful life. I look for ways to share it and grow into more of it. Knowing more means loving more. 

The More You Know…

Happy Valentine’s Day, Everyone!