There’s a lot of good advice about. If we filter out the rubbish. And if we listen properly.
Some advice that will definitely have been given to you already, and that you have probably given to others, is:
Live every day as if it were your last.
And sure. This is great advice.
But I think I can do better.
Live every day as if it were your first.
Remembering
I prefer this edited version. Remembering innocence, and the freedom and space to learn that this can bring. It’s inspired by my 2 year old Izobel.
Izobel asks the same questions over and over until she understands. She is never embarrassed by this repetition. She falls over, laughs and gets up again. And because Izobel has no concept of her own limitations she pushes most things that she does to failure. Then learns by what she did wrong. This, of course includes, painting herself with soup and going to the toilet in the bread aisle at Morrisons. But because Izobel has no experience or understanding of the judgment of others, and the pain and paralysis that we allow ourselves to feel as a result of such things as we get older, she is oblivious to the apparent wrongness of what she is doing right now.
This frees her. She is learning infinitely more, infinitely faster than I am.
And I am 48 years older than Izobel.
Or should that be, ‘because I am 48 years older than Izobel’?
Be Curious
So I suggest you change the last word of this age old advice.
Live each day as if it were your first.
Be endlessly and agelessly curious. From today if you like. Do something new. Especially if you’ve been thinking about it for a while now.
Be like Izobel.
Read the big paragraph above back to yourself.
Do everything Izobel does.
Apart from wetting your pants by the bagels in Morrisons.
Leave that bit out.
(Or go to Aldi. They don’t mind you doing it there, I find).
