How to design a good life - Tommy Dixon

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For the first two decades of life, we are pushed along a straight and wide river. But, somewhere around age 20, we get spit out and left to cross an unknown sea without any prescribed path or good guidance. When you’re used to following a script, it’s hard to learn to write one. When the script is finished, it can feel like the story is over. At least, the pleasant parts. This is disquieting at best, depressing at worst. The mark of maturity is to move from reading the script to writing your own. Wisdom, boiled down, is making the story you inhabit beautiful. ~~~ Most of designing a good life, a life that fits you, is letting go of what you think it should look like, all the preconceived notions for the dream career/partner/city, and instead being open to what presents itself continually. Simply put: paying attention. When you're too focused on making exactly what you want happen, you become blind to the real life you're living and miss the real opportunities all around you. I think se

I would love to live like a river flows carried by the surprise of its own unfolding — John O’Donohue A Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple (Hubert Robert, 1760) For the first two decades of life, we are pushed along a straight and wide river. But, somewhere around age 20, we get spit out and left to cross an unknown sea without any prescribed path or good guidance. When you’re used to following a script, it’s hard to learn to write one. When the script is finished, it can feel like the story is over. At least, the pleasant parts. This is disquieting at best, depressing at…

How to design a good life - Tommy Dixon

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