I want a rewarding career. I want the TedEx stage. I want to say something important. I want to move people. I want to be published and I want to be paid for my work.
I want time with my husband. I want to forage vegetables from our garden and cook at home. I want to remember how happy is he when he hums on the trails.
I want to age well. I want to hike with power and swim with ease. I want my face to have a natural glow, a healthy bronze from time in the sun.
I want to travel the world. I want to stay in hotels with linen sheets and write in cafes for hours. I want to meet people on walking tours and go searching for tapas together.
I want a community. I want you to drop by for dinner so we can share ideas for the next neighborhood project. I want to create weird art together.
I want kids. I want to wipe their snotty noses while we walk to school by the ocean. I want them to jump in puddles at forest school in Berlin or grow vegetables together in Helsinki. I want to teach them the joy of riding a bike and how to bake chewy cookies.
I want time to do nothing or lie in my hammock and read. I want to be in nature and I want to travel the world. I want and I want and I want.
I am feeling everything very deeply these days. It seems like my desires never stop and I have new ideas every minute. I think sometimes I get lost in my own dreams but I really want to stay balanced and present in the wonderful ways my life is unfolding today. How do you balance your desires with being grateful for what you have? Here are my tips:
What if nothing changed? This was a journaling prompt shared with me by my coach
. What if we had the same job, home, partner, and general life situation that we have now? Would you think differently? Show-up differently in your day-to-day?Practice the art of noticing. Many of my most happy moments are simply because I took note, no matter how small they may be. “And I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.” - Kurt Vonnegut
Practice daily gratitude. I do this in my journal and sometimes before dinner (out loud with my husband). It really helps me.
📖 Further Reading 📖
The only “Get Ready With Me” (GRWM) you need to read! By
Thank you to
for this amazing interview, chock full of resources, but most importantly for the introduction of the podcast Upstream. I am currently listening to the “Politics of Pleasure” and it’s blowing my mind. The podcast is unpacking “critical hedonism” - how we can approach pleasure in “more prosocial, collaborative and mutually-beneficial” ways. Sign me up.
Cover photo by Alexis Fauvet on Unsplash
I am looking forward to learning more about critical hedonism. Thank you for the link.
I love the quote: "you can have anything you want, as long as you are willing to pay the price."
To me, we can have broad ambition to want things across multiple dimensions, but we'll have to give up something (maybe a lot) within each dimension.
Thus, it's important to have a good sense for what is "enough" in any one category. What is enough money? Enough health? Enough relationships? Cultivating this enough-sense is critical.
Wrote more about it here: https://newsletter.thewayofwork.com/p/ambition