The spiritual teacher Sadhguru, once asked his students: “Do you know why a nomad is called a nomad? It is because he is not mad. He keeps moving throughout his life and never gets stuck in one place.”
When I look back at all the countries and places I have been to, from a monastery outside of Bangkok, to the empty house on the beach in El Salvador where we spent one night while surfing, to the mud mosque in Timbuktu in northern Mali, to the vast swamps of the biggest natural irrigation system in South Sudan, to the empty houses we danced in in Buenos Aires, and the lush green mountains in Vumba in Zimbabwe. That’s when I felt alive, when I knew what life is truly about, the zest for life, when you suddenly see how the floors blossom in your garden, when you decide to go for a walk with your dogs one morning just to see the sun rise. Life is always about experiencing it, feeling it, living it not thinking.
“The best things in life are on the other side of fear.” says Will Smith and he is right. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Get out of your comfort zone. Life within us wild, free and alive. It is forever seeking risk, adventure and expansion.
Many of us are told at an early age that the road map to a happy and ‘successful’ life is to study hard, get a well-paid job, get married, buy a house and that, once all the boxes are ticked, THEN we will be happy. If I remember when I felt truly at peace and fulfilled, it had nothing to do with ticking these boxes. It was in the back of a bus driving to a new destination in Latin America and feeling the freedom, that I had nowhere to go, nothing to achieve.
We can be happy without a car, a promotion and a house. Happiness is not something to ‘get.’ It happens naturally when it is not being blocked. When you do things you love doing, you will naturally enjoy life, you feel that zest for life.
We miss so much of the wonder and beauty around us through being lost in our thinking minds. Life is here, in this current moment but we miss it because we are deeply absorbed in mental movies about the past and the future. It is about learning to play again, to let go, where you have nothing to achieve and nowhere to go. Rediscover the wholeheartedness of living, and the deep connection it will bring you to inner satisfaction. Yet, in reality, as adults we are always so busy struggling to establish who we are and forgot the simple things that made us happy.
To throw ourselves into the world, into the surprising and uncomfortable, when we discover for the first time what was right before our eyes, it opens us to the wonder of living. And because we are always growing, always changing and adapting, we should release ourselves into the unfamiliar and new again and again and again: walking with your dogs at sunrise, exploring a new coffee place, taking up a new hobby or striking up a conversation with a complete stranger.
