I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how easy it is to accidentally live a life you never actually chose. Not that it's a bad life. It just isn't unique to you as a 1 of 1 human. That’s what makes it strange.
You can be surrounded by good people, doing work you enjoy, living somewhere you like, and still wake up one day and realize that a surprising amount of your life just sort of happened to you.
You took an opportunity because it was there. You stayed somewhere because it was comfortable. You became friends with people because you happened to be around them. You developed routines because you did them enough times that eventually they became "just what I do".
And over time, without ever really choosing it, those decisions become your life.
I think about this because I’ve always been pretty intentional about the big things. What I want to build. Where I want to go. The kind of work I want to do. I spend an almost unhealthy amount of time thinking about the future.
But lately I’ve realized that being intentional about your goals and being intentional about your life aren’t necessarily the same thing.
You can be incredibly deliberate about your career and completely forget that you have to be just as intentional about the life you are building outside of that career.
You can know exactly where you want your company to be in five years and have no idea what kind of friend you want to be. You can have goals for how much money you want to make without ever thinking about what you actually want that money to allow you to experience. You can spend years building a life for some future version of yourself while barely asking whether you like the way your days feel right now.
And your days are kind of the whole thing. You have to learn how to enjoy the life you’re living while still working toward the one you want. Because one day, when you’re older and looking back, your life will just be the accumulation of all these ordinary days. Each one is an opportunity to live intentionally and build a life you’ll eventually be grateful you lived.
I think we have this tendency to imagine our lives as these big collections of important moments. The places we travel. The things we build. The people we fall in love with. The accomplishments we’re proud of. But most of life isn’t made up of those moments.
It’s who you call when something funny happens. It’s the day to day when you have nothing planned. It’s the conversations you have over dinner. The people you make time for. The places you keep returning to. The things you pay attention to.
Those small choices seem almost meaningless individually, but eventually they stack on top of each other and become a life. Which makes me wonder how many of them I’m actually choosing.
I don’t mean that every second needs to be optimized or that you need some grand philosophy behind how you spend your free time. That sounds exhausting. I actually think part of a good life is leaving enough room for randomness to surprise you.
But there’s a difference between leaving room for randomness and living accidentally. I want to be able to explain why the important things in my life are there. Why I live where I live. Why I spend my time the way I do. Why certain people are close to me. Why I’m building what I’m building. Why I’m chasing certain things and ignoring others. And maybe even more importantly, I want the people I love to feel intentionally loved.
I don’t want to assume my friends & family know how much they mean to me. I want to tell them. I don’t want years to pass before we take the trip we’ve talked about forever. I want to book it. I want to ask my parents questions about their lives while I still can. I want to make memories that become the stories we’re still telling each other when we’re old.
I want to keep putting myself around people who make me think differently. Read things I disagree with. Learn about things that have absolutely nothing to do with my work. Go places that change my perspective. Keep finding evidence that the world is much bigger and more interesting than whatever version of it currently exists inside my head.
I want to choose more of it. Because I think one of the scariest possibilities isn’t ending up with a bad life. It’s ending up with a perfectly fine life that you never really decided on. A life assembled from convenience, expectations, routines, and decisions you made so gradually that you never noticed you were making them.
Obviously, none of us gets to choose everything. Life has a pretty good habit of ignoring whatever plans we make for it. People change. Opportunities disappear. Things happen that we could never predict.
Maybe intention isn’t about controlling what happens. Maybe it’s just about being awake enough to participate in it. To periodically look at your life and ask yourself whether the things filling your days are still things you would choose today. And if they aren’t, having the courage to change them.
I don’t know exactly what I want my life to look like thirty or forty years from now. I actually hope I don’t. I hope I change my mind a hundred times between now and then. But I know how I want it to feel.
I want to have loved people well. I want the people around me to have grown because we knew each other. I want to have stayed curious long enough to keep changing my mind. I want to have gone places, tried things, made mistakes, asked question, and collected an unreasonable amount of stories along the way.
I want to look back at my life and recognize myself in it. Not because everything went according to plan. But because, whenever I had the choice, I chose it.