Mostly we're striving, hoping, longing for the time we can say with some certainty, "Life has been good to me". Until then, while we're waiting, life can only be provisional, until the moment we can say at last "I made it".But instead, how about taking up the question from the other side?Would it not be more fulfilling, more within your reach, and an even greater gift to find out that instead, you've discovered already how to be good to life?
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There's so much of life in which you're both active participant and where you're not looking. So perhaps it's not surprising that sometimes you're acting in a way that makes your intentions difficult to realise - and you just didn't get to see your part in it yet.It's the act of starting to look closely, with sufficient rigour and discipline, that can show you what was right in front of you all along. And once you see what's there, with eyes wide open, you'll have the possibility to invent new practices - new ways of acting again and again that can more fully support your intentions.Relationships are a wonderful place to begin this, because we often take them to be fixed, like objects. 'I have a good relationship with Carol', you might say, 'but my relationship with Jim is quite difficult'. Speaking about them in this way draws attention away from all the ways in which you, Jim, and Carol are participants in a phenomenon that's always changing, always unfolding as each of you acts and speaks.So here are some daily questions you can use to observe yourself, and your participation in relationships, over the next week.
What are the habits you have that diminish you?It's not so difficult to find out what they are. You'll probably do them automatically, without thinking. They'll soothe you in some way. And they'll leave you afterwards with the vaguely queasy feeling of having wasted your time - they're distracting rather than nourishing, numbing rather than enlivening, they cover up what's going on rather than have you face it, and they have you turn away from genuine connection with yourself and with other people.A few candidates for you to consider:
What if, instead of rushing headlong into everything at such speed, you committed yourself to slowing down, just a little?Yes, even you, with so many important and urgent projects and responsibilities to take care of that you don't have a moment even to think.How would a 5% reduction in pace be for you?Walk just a little slower from meeting to meeting. Pause, just a little longer, before you speak. Breathe just a couple more breaths before you answer or make that call. Sit, for just a second to two, before you switch from one task to another. Listen, just a little more attentively, and let what the other person is saying sink in, for a moment longer, before you respond.Open up a tiny space where there was none before.You might imagine that nothing that's important will get done if you commit to this, such is your certainty that there's never enough time in any case.But you could find that your relationships with others deepen, bit by bit, as they begin to feel your quality of contact with them deepen also; that you can be more genuinely responsive; and that you react in fewer of the predictable, automatic, indiscriminate ways that have become your habit over the years.And you might discover that slowing down so you can be present to yourself and others actually makes
It's easy to relate to the objects which fill our world as if they were just there - a taken for granted, already existing feature of human life.But the materials in everything you own or use - everything - had to either be grown by somebody or dug out of the ground first. Even the most synthetic and complex of products start out this way. Growing and mining, the source of it all.That's quite a thought to consider. Take any object around you, from the smallest bolt to the tallest building, and imagine back through the long and complex chain of people and interlocking processes to the raw materials that came from the earth itself.Remembering the source of everything, and the commitment and ingenuity that makes it all possible, can be a way of cultivating deep gratitude and wonder that any of it is available to you in the first place.These must be more possibility-filled moods than the resentment or frustration we can so readily feel at all the products that don't work as expected, at the chaos of the world, at the sheer everyday humdrum repetitive ordinariness of things. And gratitude, for this aspect of life's many wonders, can go a long way to awakening the sense of possibility, responsibility and focussed commitment we need in order to do our best work and inspire others.
"There's nothing that can be done. It's just the way it is"The moment you say this about the situation you're in, particularly if you're in a position to lead or influence people, you close the door to many possibilities. Mostly, you're inviting a mood of 
We've built our culture on the premise that more is always better. That there's no such thing as enough.We think we'd be better off we had more time, more money, a bigger house, a nicer car, the latest fashion, the newest smartphone, a bigger job, more market share, more efficiency. We construct our lives around this premise and we construct our organisations, institutions, and politics around it too. It's endemic.We've even gone as far as to relabel ourselves in this fashion. We're no longer people but consumers. Without acknowledging how demeaning it is to be understood as yawning open mouths sated only by the arrival of more stuff, companies and politicians refer to us in this way - and we take it. Once upon a time we used to be citizens, but you'll have to listen hard to hear that in our public discourse these days.All of this 'more' seems so obvious, and so unquestionable, we can't see what it's doing to us. We can't see the way it has us relate to the whole of life as if there were not enough. Not enough time, not enough space, not enough shiny things, not enough holidays, not enough growth, not enough experiences. We can't see how it has us hoard our possessions such that many of us have way more than we require, while others cannot meet their basic needs. We can't see how it has us work like machines, ignoring our families, our loved ones, our friends, our relationship with nature, with art, with stillness, with beauty. We can't see how our obsession with more fuels the degradation of the environment in which we live, and of the bodies that support us. We can't see how our sense of lack, even when all our basic needs are more than fulfilled, eats away at our lives and our experience of living.If you look closely at life, you'll find that once you've satisfied your basic, most essential needs, acquiring more on its own rarely - if ever - produces the fulfilment and feeling of safety you've been longing for. Or if it does, it doesn't last for very long, replaced as it is by a gnawing anxiety that what you now have still isn't enough.Only when you start to see the hollowness of the 'more' narrative we're all living in can you also begin to see what's genuinely satisfying. Deep, truthful, courageous relationships. Community. Seeing and being seen. Serving others wholeheartedly, and accepting the gifts of others' service. Finding your voice, your unique contribution, and bringing it. Curiosity and wonder. Being part of a commitment bigger than yourself. Slowing down enough to be present in life rather than ever absent from it.The best question to ask yourself when you are caught up in the spiral of more is 'for the sake of what?'. If your only answer is 'so I can have more' or 'because I want it' you'd better ask again. Perhaps you'll find a genuine, honest answer why more is necessary. But if you can't find one perhaps it's time to turn away from what you're so sure you must have, and into life itself.