Thoughts on Life

Breathe deep, be with your body. Pay attention to it, hold it, feel into it, what aches, what hurts, and learn what feels good. Flex and stretch it, roll and sensualise it, touch and love it. Don’t shy away from it, don’t dislike it, don’t pick fault with it; it is you. If you think you like who you are, yet dislike your body, you don’t really love you. Love its marks, shapes, colours, its age, and its curvy or pointy bits, its extra or lack of bits. Trust it. Hold it and allow it to be held. Have pride it in, it is yours, and it is what makes you alive and what allows you to live and love. As it should be, it already is. Love it anyway.

Walk, dance, and move more. Allow every bone and muscle to feel every movement, move it all, keep it alive, flowing, going. Without health, without the physical ability to do all the things you wish to do, life merely gets tougher. If it is already restricted, do all that you can to allow it movement, flow, life. Love it anyway.

Love your mind. No matter what abilities or skills, or what lack or struggles, it too is how you navigate life, relationships, learning, passing on your knowledge, work and play. Utilise it, refresh it, help those grey cells thrive and live by always feeding it more. Always allow it time to rest and play too. If your mind is a challenge for you, be that mental health, neurodiversity, lack of education, intellectual or academic ability, use what you have, learn what you can, let it thrive in environments of exploration and learning. Love it anyway.

Nurture and nourish your heart. Feel every feeling, great and awful. Allow yourself, give yourself permission, you are entitled to all of them. We’re trained to swallow or repress, ignore or deny them, don’t do that. Those same feelings will arise time and again until you truly allow yourself to feel them, spend them, so they may pass. Roll the taste of them around on your tongue, in your mouth, in your body. Where does that hurt? Where does that enliven or excite? Let the tears flow, let the laughter ring out loudly, let freedom and truth guide your emotions so that you are, wholly you, heart open and honest, deep and shallow, let all of the truth of your feelings be alive. If your heart is weary or sore, forgive it, its all we really have to guide us through life and learn heart lessons from. Love it anyway.

Seek adventure and experience, suck the very marrow from the bone of this thing we call life. No regrets, only experiences and memories, great and awful. Travel, meet new people, seek out lives other than your own to learn from, other cultures, races, languages. Do all the things you as a child wanted to do in life, whatever those things may have been. Learn to live again, and to drink deeply from this life we are given. If you have restrictions, do what you can, when you can, how you can. Live life as much as you can so that the only things you ever have regret for are the things you haven’t done, not the things you have. Good times and bad, love life’s experiences anyway.

Make connections. Don’t be an island, except from time to time as it is useful to you, to go within and love oneself, to breathe and be a human being, rather than a human doing. Meet people, make new friends, talk to passing acquaintances and learn about them, we can all learn so much from others. Love freely and openly, even knowing that sometimes that love is not returned, and forgive those who love you when you cannot in return. You will not be liked by everyone, and you will not like everyone; it matters not. Interacting with others is what matters, the connections, the intimacy, the web of beings we share our lives and this planet with. Love anyway.

Explore spirituality, openly and freely. Make your own choices, whatever you choose to believe, it is your choice, nobody else’s. Whether you choose a religion, a spirituality, or prefer currently proven facts, science, or indeed both. Whether you choose to disbelieve in any form spirituality and simply choose another way for a moral compass, or find nature your source of solace, that too is your choice, it matters not. What matters is that it is indeed your own choice entirely, and that as such you respect anyone else’s right to choose for themselves, too.

Nurture and nourish one another. Do not harm, diminish or belittle each other. Thrive together, do not divide and wither apart. ‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion’ but do take time to consider; and if your opinion harms another, either rethink it or keep it to yourself. Diversity and difference is what makes us human, do more to welcome and make allowance for it, and less to do harm because of it. Love one another anyway.

Be kind. So much of life and the world would be more beautiful, if we were all simply kinder to each other. Be thoughtful, considerate and acknowledging of one another. Witness each other in all our differences, and be respectful of other beings also going about the business of living their lives. Be compassionate to those less fortunate than yourself. Be passionate in elevating others, by which actions in turn you too shall be elevated. Be loving, as when someone appears to deserve it the least, is probably when they need it the most. Speak less, listen more.

Love anyway.