What if you decided to reorganize your life? I don’t mean cleaning out the junk drawer in your kitchen. Not a trip to Goodwill with the kid’s old school clothes. Not a garage spring-cleaning or finally getting to those boxes in the attic. Marie Kondo and her hoards of suburban decluttering acolytes don’t even cut it. I’m talking about something even bigger and more profound. What if you tore out your life by its roots? Where would you replant it? What would it look like if you could reorganize your life around what is most deep and beautiful in your heart?
These are the thoughts that followed Jen and I home from Bhutan this spring. An itch for something new had grown into a full blown ache for drastic change while there. Certainly, Jen and I never made a conscious plan that ended with me giving anesthesia in Texas and her struggling to convince Baptists that yoga isn’t devil worship. We just looked up one day and here we were, flatlined in a life we had stumbled into.
A very comfortable life to be sure. A two-story brick house, three cars, subscription wine and clothing services, three televisions, four iPads, and a bedroom just for the kids to get dressed in! So why then were we feeling such a growing sense of tension? Why this ache for change? Because we were living someone else’s life.
We met in Tibet for goodness sake. We’ve meditated with the Dalai Lama and talked kite flying with Deepak Chopra. We once emptied our bank account and started traveling east. And we kept heading in that direction until we returned home again, 8 months later. But somehow we had forgotten all this. Jen literally had to remind me about that mediation in Dharamsala. How could I have forgotten about that? Kids, anesthesia school, paying bills, getting a mortgage, all the things that the American dream is built of had buried that memory of the Dalai Lama and the memory of what is most deep and beautiful in my heart.
And Bhutan blew away all of that. Once again we felt the joy of being our authentic selves. This spring we spent Thai new year with our kids in a city-wide water fight on the streets of Bangkok. We ate yak-cheese dumplings in the Himalaya and hiked to centuries old temple fortresses. How do we come back from that? What do you do after taking the red pill, after you peeked behind the curtain and seen the illusion of your life? The only answer we could come up with…
Take another step into the wild, blow up your life, embrace the uncertainty and leap.
If you are curious about how our experiment to mindfully reshape our life is going, subscribe to our blog, and we’ll keep you up to date on our shenanigans.
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