Your Life Recipe

Continuing on from my last post, I'm thinking about what makes our life our own, and one worth living. In my own experience and from what I've learned from companioning clients the last three decades, often we end up living a life we didn't actively choose and aren't particularly enjoying. How many of us went into careers our parents wanted for us, chose partners for the wrong reasons, hung out with people whose company we didn't really enjoy (and vice versa), wore high heels when we would've preferred overalls or a football uniform when we longed for a princess dress? I'm pretty sure if I took a vote on the street, the great majority of (honest) people would say they had made significant life decisions that didn't align with their true feelings. I know I have.

After college and the Peace Corps, I moved to San Francisco. It had clearly called me, and I responded. There was much to love there, but within a year I realized I wasn't meant to be a city dweller. I needed more trees, more flowers, and more. . . space. Since then, I've made ample choices that reflected who I was at the moment (or who I thought I was), but I've also made some giant decisions that were out of alignment with my true nature, decisions that ended up causing myself and people I loved heartache as I eventually decided to live my life according to my own recipe for sabor, a Spanish word for flavor--yumminess in the fullest sense of the word.

I want to know what the ingredients are for your life recipe. Do you prefer snowy winters, hearing owls call across the trees at night, baking bread, and reading a good novel that keeps you awake too late at night? Or do you live further south, perhaps near the water, paddle boarding most early mornings before heading to work, picking up fish tacos on the way home to watch Netflix, then conking out by 8 pm? Both sound like good lives depending on what's happening between these moments and, most importantly, inside our hearts and minds. I certainly believe we can be happy anywhere if we choose to be--that familiar adage, "Bloom where you're planted" fits here. But I also believe that to really be happy, we need to heal our hurt parts, and we need to listen to what our souls are calling us to, and respond.

What about you? What's your life recipe? Is your current life filled with ingredients you love? Or like the examples above, are you wearing snow shoes when you'd rather be wearing flip flops? It's time to choose! And while you're choosing, consider adding time to give back to your recipe; that always feels good! And the world needs us, all of us.