How You Can Live A Fulfilled Life at Any Age
What does it mean to live a fulfilled life?
When asked what it means to live a fulfilled life, Dr. Joos Meyer, a medical doctor at Fremantle Hospital in Western Australia said,
“Being in the moment, awake and alive and able to enjoy things now. Not worrying about the past or postponing happiness to a distant future.”
I love this response because it supports my belief that having a full life is not about being busy, acquiring stuff, or even being healthy in my old age.
I often hear people describe a full life in terms of what is quantifiable, like finances, living to a certain age, or having many grandchildren.
Or they speak of accomplishments, health, bucket lists, or goals.
I wonder, though, about people who have acquired and achieved and yet feel unable to relax into their final years or moments with a sense of fullness.
And what about someone with a severe handicap who lives a good portion of their time confined to bed and requires an attendant to help with activities of daily living?
A definition based on productivity eliminates the possibility of a full life for such a person.
What would Mary Oliver
say about a fulfilled life?
I listen to the words of Mary Oliver, who, for me, summarizes the question with her poem “When it is Over.”
“When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it is over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
― Mary Oliver
I believe ‘simply having visited this world’ is the underlying problem of an unfulfilled life.
There have been times in my life in which I was so busy making a living or surviving challenges or attending to the needs of others that I missed every opportunity for ‘amazement.’
To live in the present moment, awake and alive, and enjoy simple things does not depend on my productivity, nor is it impacted by disability.
It relies upon instead of having built practices of awareness and gratitude, of pausing and listening, of feeling and expressing gratitude.
The idea of living fully must embrace the concept of hospitality towards whatever arrives. (See The Guest House by Rumi).
Some factors in a ‘full life.’
Because there is a certain amount of luck in the people and events that arrive throughout a lifespan, I want to be careful not to pin my idea of fullness to only the good or fun things.
To the enjoyment of only the kind, generous and talented people.
I have learned how to disagree with my neighbor without going to war. And I also have learned how to pray for people caught in webs of evil.
I am not the same person I was 20 or 40 or 60 years ago. At each life stage, what made life full changed with my expectations and experiences at the time.
In my 20’s I thought my life was complete with a new job, a new spouse, and and a healthy body.
Somewhere in my soul, I had connected fullness with abundance and success. Or at least busyness.
One by one, I lost my job, my spouse, and my health. I was filled with despair as life became one challenge after another, a life most often met with failure.
At that point, I wouldn’t have described a life with so much loss as full life.
Then my health became more stable. I had a new spouse and a new career. Indeed, my life was ‘full.’
I was busy and successful and happy. And then, as I neared my 60’s, I again lost my spouse, my health, and I had to retire.
The cycle of filling and emptying
There seems to be a cycle in life of emptying and filling – and emptying and filling.
So when I say I want to live a full life right up until my last breath, I wonder if I am saying I want to be on a ‘filling’ cycle instead of an emptying one?
Is there a paradox here? Can there be fullness amid emptiness?
If I do not consider the losses that create a feeling of emptiness and instead focus on the inner space that waits to be filled, I can trust that like a cup, my life will always be either in a process of filling or emptying.
Life overflows with possibilities.
I am free to ‘marry amazement,’ as Mary Oliver describes.
But to become the bride of amazement, I must be in the moment, not clinging to that which has been poured out, not grasping for more to fill the space.
In conclusion – a paradox
Fullness in life is not measured by the level of emptiness but by embracing this process.
I fear finding my life so full of meaningless trivia that I have no space or time just to be.
To smell roses. To hear birds sing. To pet a kitten. To wonder. To gaze. To breathe it all in as if it were air to my soul.
The paradox is, the more I welcome emptiness in my life, the fuller it becomes.
But only if I am “in the moment, awake and alive and able to enjoy things now.” Not worrying about the past or postponing happiness to a distant future.”
To read and listen to my journey with one of those times of emptiness and how I moved on, go to “Learning to Sit with Loss”
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