500 Words a Week - How to instantly make your life longer
When I go outside, I have a simple question/ framework I use to understand whether I am lost in my head/ preoccupied with my thoughts. That is, can I see the green in the leaves of the trees around me. If I can notice the colour of the leaves, the way they move in a gust of wind, I know that I am present in the moment. That I’m not completely lost in my own mind. This feeling or presence expands, we see a cool building we had always walked by but never noticed. We see the joy of a young child as they have escaped their parents hands, and are barreling down the path, one shaky step after the other, as their parent frantically keeps up with them. Life in these moments of presence feels long.
Much talk around longevity discusses certain routines we must adhere to, periods of fasting, cold plunges, saunas, Z2 cardio work. Yet it never discusses our experience. What we are actually going through.
A year to us now tends to fly by, yet when we were a child, a year felt like an incomprehensible sum of time. As a child who could think of a year in the future, when today brings so much to explore and experience. We need to relearn some of this childlike sense of wonder and exploration at what is around us.
Rather than endlessly researching the best ways to add time to our life, maybe we should devote more time and attention to how we spend the current time we have. So that we can work on making the time we have left feel more substantial. How we do this might be by filling our time with new and challenging experiences. The more one day feels like the next, the more they blur into one another, disappearing faster and faster from our grasp.
“Too many people live the same year 80 times over. And call it a life.” - Robin Sharma
However, the real way to instantly make our life longer and more substantial is instead of constantly looking for novel things for us to do and experience, we look to what we already experience and do through novel eyes. We think we know all there is to know about our neighbourhood, or the friends and people we see regularly. Yet we have barely scratched the surface.
To instantly make our life feel longer, we must start living with open eyes. We must stop staring at the ground as we walk from place to place, and look up, look around us. Notice rather than see. Look deeply at another's face and have the courage to ask questions that go beyond the surface, that delve into the soul.
To make our life last longer, we need to start living consciously. Stop playing life on autopilot, drifting through all that we experience.
