Don’t Just Get Through Life, Actually Live It

How to stop unconsciously missing out on life

In this day and age, too many people mindlessly coast through life — millennials especially.

How many times have you heard the phrase, “I’m just trying to get through the day,” or “I’m just trying to get through the week!”

Granted, life can have some difficult periods that we don’t want to go through, but how often does this turn into, “getting through” the month, then “getting through” the year …… When I use the term “get through,” I’m referring to those periods when we aren’t fully conscious or present in life; when we are going through something that we don’t like and end up mindlessly coasting through.

It’s easy to unconsciously fall into this passive, lifeless sort of existence because our lives are essentially an abstraction. You don’t experience life in a single whole period, you live moment by moment. These moments add up to form days, which then make up months and years etc. So you can kind of just passively get through each moment, disregarding it as unimportant, but then they add up. Moments turn into days, days into weeks, weeks into months; next thing you know, you’re at a particular point in your life, not really knowing how you got there, thinking time has just flown by. Sound familiar?

Because life is made up of these individual moments, when you don’t fully experience each moment consciously, when you’re just “getting through” these individual moments you end up just “getting through” your life, instead of actually living it.

This is a trap you don’t want to fall into because, well, what else is there to do but live your life?

The reason this is such an issue in modern-day western society is that most people are way too busy to consciously live a full life where they are present in each moment — or at least in most of them. Everything is a rush: you’re multitasking constantly, grounded in goals that you’re trying to reach as fast as you possibly can. There is no way anyone can possibly savour and enjoy the day to day moments of life when they are mindlessly rushing through everything. And if you aren’t savouring each individual moment of life, then you aren’t savouring life as a whole.

Imagine going on a long road trip where the driver is just trying to get to each destination as fast as possible. You wouldn’t have any time to really savour the experience, take in the wonderful sights, compare the different towns and structures within them. You wouldn’t have time to stop by and enjoy the local restaurants in passing towns, check out the nicest museums and galleries, park up to go on some of the nicest walks. You wouldn’t have time to go on the scenic routes. You wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of the individual moments on that journey. Then when it’s finished you’d sit there like you do after a year of mindless living; confused, wondering where the last few days had gone.

What I’ve described, is a perfect analogy for how most people live their lives.

We live like it’s a race, like we are trying to get to the end as quickly as possible, like we have somewhere else to be. Even if you believe in an afterlife, we have all of eternity to spend there right? So what’s the hurry?

In his famous lectures, Alan Watts would often compare life to a dance or a song, he said: “In music, though, one doesn’t make the end of the composition the point of a composition. If that were so the best conductors would be the ones who played fastest. And there would be composers who only wrote finales.”

Watts’ perspective was that, like a dance, you are meant to enjoy each moment of life as an end in and of itself, not just as a means to something else.

Minimalism

Typically, minimalism refers to the act of reducing one’s unnecessary possessions, so that a person can focus more on the things that matter most to them. However, Leo Guru introduced me to a different kind of minimalism: life minimalism.

This is where rather than just removing your unnecessary possessions, you remove all unnecessary things from your life. You do fewer things, more slowly with more mindfulness and attention. You stop multitasking, as much as you can, doing things one at a time.

For example, when you’re making food, you shouldn’t be scrolling on your phone, listening to music, while talking to your friend in the other room at the same time. Instead, you would just cook your food, then sit down to eat it without doing anything else. When you’re finished, if you have some other task to do, like checking your work emails, you’d go and reply to them without doing anything else; without having other tabs open, listening to music or any other distractions. In this way, you do fewer things in the day, but you give them your full attention and you spread them out over a longer time period.

This really allows you to be much more present, experiencing each moment of life fully — as opposed to being half there half somewhere else. I’ve found this not only allows you to be much more effective with each task you do — because they each have your full attention — but it also allows you to enjoy each thing much more.

I won’t lie and pretend that I’ve been perfect at practising this type of minimalism, but when I have, I notice my productivity goes through the roof. I used to think that I was getting lots of stuff done by multitasking, but in reality, I was just doing a lot of things poorly, which is the same as doing nothing. Overall it takes me less time to do all my tasks because I get each individual task done much more quickly, to a much higher standard.

With regards to enjoyment, I notice an even bigger difference. It’s difficult to articulate if you haven’t actually experienced it. But my days feel a lot more full. They feel longer but in a good way. I get less of that “where has the day gone” feeling, where you’re getting ready for bed and it seems like the day has flown past, as if you haven’t really been there and you’ve somehow missed it. I also notice that I enjoy the simple things in life — which I’d normally disregard — a lot more when I’m living a minimalistic life. Because I’m not getting so distracted and my brain isn’t so overstimulated, I don’t need to do things like binge on Netflix or scroll through posts on Facebook to entertain myself. Typically boring things become more exciting and enjoyable. I end up getting just as much entertainment from small things like going on a walk and noticing nature, cooking dinner, or having a simple conversation with a friend.

Granted, at first, it is a struggle. Initially, you will find this very difficult and boring. You’re so used to distraction, your dopamine receptors are so overstimulated that it will feel painful living like this. In the same way that when an alcoholic stops drinking, they initially have withdrawal symptoms. However, once they’ve gotten through that difficult transitional phase, they feel much better for it.

Meditation

Meditation comes up in a lot of my articles because it has so many diverse benefits. It’s such a powerful tool.

This article is no different. Practising any form of meditation — preferably mindfulness — will help you become much more present. It will allow you to stop focusing so much on the past and future, which is integral for being able to fully experience each moment of life.

It will also stop your constant mental chattering; allowing you to have a peaceful, quiet mind. One of the major reasons people let the real moments in life pass them by is because of the insatiable inner dialogue that goes on in their head. When your focus is always grounded in this mental chattering, it’s not available to experience the reality that’s happening right now.

Meditation goes hand in hand with minimalism. In fact, the main reason to live a minimalistic life is so that you are more able to be mindful. You can’t be mindful when you’re packing your day with unnecessary stuff and doing 6 things at a time.

These practices are very powerful, but it’s important not to get too neurotic with them. We are all different and we all live different lives, you don’t have to be completely minimalistic or meditate for hours a day, like a Buddhist monk. Maybe your job requires a lot of multitasking, maybe you only have 10 minutes in the day to meditate. That’s okay. If you can incorporate these practices at a level which bests suits you, you’ll notice a difference in the overall quality of your life.

Remember, if you want to live a full, rich life; you have to appreciate each moment individually. In the same way that someone climbing a mountain has to appreciate the importance of each individual step.

If you liked this article, every week I unpack the deeper meaning behind one commonly misunderstood principle.

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