The Life You're Waiting to Enjoy Is Already Happening
What if you were never going to get any richer, younger, thinner, or more successful? What if this is it?
There is a peculiar bargain a lot of women make with themselves.
I’ll enjoy my life when things settle down.
When the kids need less. When work gets easier. When there is more money. When the house is finished. When I lose the weight. When I know what I’m doing. When everyone else is okay. When I have finally handled the enormous pile of things that apparently must be handled before I am permitted to have a good time.
The trouble is that life is extremely good at producing another thing to handle.
There will always be an unfinished project, somebody who needs something, a problem you could solve, a room you could clean, an email you could answer, a better habit you could establish.
You can spend decades preparing to eventually inhabit your own life.
And I don’t think the alternative is abandoning responsibility and running naked through the forest with a bottle of champagne.
Although I remain open to the possibility.
I mean something much more ordinary.
Buy the flowers because you like looking at them.
Wear the dress on an unremarkable Wednesday.
Take the afternoon.
Learn the thing you keep saying you’ll learn someday.
Make your coffee in the ridiculous cup.
Cook something beautiful when nobody is coming over.
Go somewhere simply because you want to see it.
Stop treating pleasure like the prize at the end of a very long behavioral improvement program.
A beautiful life is not necessarily a life in which everything has finally gone right.
It is a life you are actually present for.
There is no future version of you who becomes more entitled to delight than you are now.
