your yet to be lived lives are calling
which one is it time to explore?
You could have lived a hundred different lives by now. Maybe a thousand.
To live is to whittle away possibilities. To choose one fork in the road over another. And to never know what you might have experienced, who you might have become, if you chose the other way.
Learning to make some kind of peace with your unlived life is part of growing down into the life you did choose. Of course, many of us didn’t get to choose — a host of factors outside our control choose for us, sometimes brutally. This too we have to metabolize if we are to continue to live more than a shadow existence.
We all possess unlived unexpressed potential. Missed opportunities. Stolen opportunities. Parts of ourselves we didn’t develop, roads we could not or did not venture down.
Yes, it is too late for those avenues, those options, those opportunities.
But there are lives ahead of you that are yearning to be explored. It is not too late for that.
Exploring these lives is not about looking backward at what could have been or should have been. Then, as Adam Phillips writes, “the story of our lives becomes the story of the lives we were prevented from living.” To focus on what was prevented or is now too late is to follow a recipe for bitterness and rancid discontent.
Instead, exploring the yet-to-be-lived life is about paying attention to what you can no longer ignore, at least not without damaging your soul.
It is not about finally making sense of life by obtaining some unique purpose or arriving at the pinnacle you were always supposed to achieve.
Instead, it is about bowing your head and saying, “I am called to try _____, I find I must experience _______, I do not want to have died without ____________” and wobbling forward.
For me, that means writing a novel that hasn’t left me alone for 24 years. I want to weep about that because it is so hard. Wrting this novel is hard work.
There are many days I want to flee from this yet-to-be-lived life. But if I do, I know I will die a little bit inside.
What must you no longer flee from? What must you continue or begin or begin again?
What wants to stretch you to meet your future?
It might be trying to find your half-sister again or hiking a stretch of wilderness trail alone or forgiving yourself for a particular mistake or learning to juggle or…
Whatever it is, may you heed the call with love and courage.
Love,
Jen
P.S. If writing a non-fiction book is on your list of things you must try, I’m convening a small group of writers starting May 14th for a coaching/learning group to give your non-fiction book a solid start or restart if it’s something you abandoned. Email me at jen@jenniferlouden.com and I’ll send you the details. We have one spot left.
Jennifer...I so agree. Some things I've tried (and abandoned some): Helping start a company that offered different sizes of bikini tops and bottoms in the same fabric, making curtains for VW vans and selling them to dealerships, making prom dresses out of antique fabrics, making stained glass sun catchers for sale, having an herb farm business, going back to college and becoming a psychotherapist at 59 (I still see clients), becoming an artist, and now, after two years of courses in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, becoming a pattern designer and selling fabric on Spoonflower. I'm also writing two Substacks. I'm 72. My plan is to try new things until I take my last breath. "It is never too late to become what you might have been." ~ George Eliot.
Thanks for this post! It reminds me of my own recent processing. Around the end of last year, I journaled that I would either bloom or wilt. I acknowledged that a part of me would die if I did not continue to bring what wants to be expressed in me into the light.
I have a personal essay getting published in Tiny Buddha in about a week, the largest publication in which I've had a piece published. So here's to choosing to bloom!