Saturday Musings ~ What does it mean to “really live”?

A recent Facebook post caught my attention. It was a simple image but the words were powerful and thought provoking.

“Are you really living or are you just paying bills until you die?”

Sometimes words simply pass us by and sometimes they are sudden, like the lights on a train on the tracks in the middle of the night and you never saw it coming. I stopped scrolling when I read that, cigarette in hand and staring quizzically into the screen of my phone.

What does it mean to “really live”?

It must be different for everyone. Some people travel and vagrantly see the world. Some are stay at home gypsies, much like I have become these days; dreamers of other places who stay settled where they are, somehow content in the life they have built. Others fall in love and never come out. Even love can take different forms; wild and free or calm and serene, like the changing moods of the ocean.

Does it mean finding what makes you content? Or does it mean we should stretch those boundaries and find the exhilaration of things we have never done before?

I can say that right now, in this moment, I am content. Cigarette lit as I write, rum in a glass beside the laptop and a recently-adopted stray cat to accompany the other fur babies on the chair beside me, with my fiancé on his way home from picking up dinner, there is bliss in this house. Between work and wedding planning, the eight fur babies in the house and writing again, my life as a whole has taken such a positive turn in the last year or so.

I can’t say what the answer is to the meaning of living. I used to live a life where when something went wrong, I up and left, no looking back and only a stretch of highway ahead. A lonesome stretch, even when someone claimed to be right beside me. When that went wrong, I’d run home again and do it all over again. I’ve stayed in the same place for about two years now. Same house, same town. The only thing that has really changed is the people. Some left and some stayed. One relationship ended in hostility and another blossomed most beautifully. There were backstabbing friends and there is still the best friend who has been there for the last 14 years in spite of men, distance and changes. I know how to be by myself and who my real friends are.

Maybe that’s the meaning for me: simplicity. A roof over my head, someone to love, my family nearby and the furry babies surrounding me when I get home every day, those noses in my face first thing in the morning to indicate breakfast time and the kitty cuddles right before bed. Johnny Cash once said his definition of paradise was having coffee with his wife, June, every morning. I can relate. Coffee in the morning or rum at night with my beloved guy are some of the fondest moments I adore.

Some people think that “really living” means thrills and glory. But I think happiness is what we create for ourselves that defines how we live, no matter what that means for you. It is your own art, your own creation and your life. Paint your own colours.

Photo by Lavinia Thompson
2012