Some Of My Own Life Tidbits
Part 1 of More To Come I’m Sure
In October I will be turning 39, the last year of a decade that has been amazing in my life journey. As I approach middle age and prepare to reach life’s midpoint, I am inspired by articles like those shown below from amazing fellow Medium writers. These wonderful reads offer insights, life tips, and tidbits for the journey from different milestone ages.
Having read these and many others, I feel inspired to offer my own list of insights and tidbits to help readers on their life journeys. Like each person, the points I offer are unique from my experience but can also carry constant currents with other writers. I will probably have more to share later on, so this is simply a general overview.
You need to build time into your life for yourself.
It doesn’t matter if you are a corporate executive, devoted center of a family with a loving spouse and numerous children, someone who must devote profound resources and energy to helping loved ones with extensive needs, or all of the above or other. If you don’t build time into life for yourself, you are likely to break. It’s not selfish, but essential. The maxim goes that in survival mode, the heart preserves blood for itself first, then pumps to other vital organs.
If life is short, then isn’t any age really young?
Strange, when you are a kid people keep saying “oh you are just a kid with your whole life ahead of you.” Yet when you become an adult, even the ages of 25 or 35 can bring chimes of “starting to get old now, huh?” (And that can seem crazy, considering life expectancy in many nations is mid 80s). But is any age really old, especially when you think of the phrase “life is short?” Considering that some creatures live for thousands of years, even the age of 110 is young. Now, countless maladies and horrific health conditions can occur and no amount of time is guaranteed. But there is the approach to life that is espoused in the adage “every day is the first of the rest of your life.” We all probably know of family or community members who still looked forward to the promise of tomorrow even as they reached 80s or older. So how come we let the common assumptions that “we are too old” or “it is too late for us” keep us from grabbing life by the tail?
We Are Barely Scratching From the Surface of Things.
We live in a very sophisticated age with amazing scientific advances and unfathomable technological marvels. We can do a Google search to answer many everyday questions or download the latest app for anything as complicated as tracking calories to recording sleep cycles. But the vast majority of things in the universe that could be known are forever going to be beyond human acquiring. In the cosmic sense, remember our planet Earth as “A Pale Blue Dot” even when seen from the edge of our solar system — itself a small speck in our galaxy which is but one of even trillions in the Universe. At the local scale, remember how little we really even know about how ourselves — our own human history and the vast majority of works ever produced are unknowable to us.
If Anyone Is In the Top 1% of Anything, They Are Among Billions In History
If you have an IQ of 150, you have more than 100 million people in history who were at the same IQ level as you(that’s factoring that an IQ of 150 is found among 1/1000 people and that about 120 billion people have ever lived). Factor in just 1% margin (as IQs are just one metric of intelligence with so many other mitigating factors), you are really among the company of billions. Also, considering all of the other proficiences and types of intelligences, the maxim “we are all smart in our own way” rings profoundly true. Each of us immeasurably unique and unboundedly wonderful, and we should celebrate this fully. But this should also remind us to be humble and open to others’ unique gifts, proficiencies, and unbounded beauty as well. Is it not numinous if humanity as a whole is a collection of billions of immeasurably wondrous gems?
Remember Your Spiritual Life
Wherever they are on the spectrum in terms of religious, spiritual, and philosophical points of view, few people would disagree that spirituality is a key component of human life. What do we mean by spirituality? Well just examine some of the word’s roots. In Latin, spiritus meant “a breathing,” or “breath of life.” In later times, its meaning broadened to include the “essential principle of something.” Well, mainly it is just the deepest spark of life within each person as well as what is unquantifiable and infinitely mysterious at the heart of things.
Many will say keeping your spiritual life flourishing is as important as getting enough food or exercise. But if you feel your spiritual life is stagnant, you don’t have to run down to a local religious institution or quit your job and make a pilgrimage to a faraway land(of course, these are wonderful spiritual paths). You just have to take some time to realign with your deeper self and connect even more to what is infinitely sacred and endlessly numinous at the heart of things. This might just be reading some poetry, listening to music, giving back in volunteer work and service, or realizing your fully lived life to be aligned with the life of the Cosmos.
These are just a few life tidbits I have to share, and they are hardly a small sample from the trillions and quadrillions of insights others have found throughout history. I certainly have multiple others I could share, but this is a good stopping point. What are some deeper insights and truths you are making better sense of in your journey?
