What Kind of Life Do You Want to Live?

The simple practice that reorients me back to my desires.

I live a mostly quiet life that is neither sexy nor glamorous. I’m at home a lot where reading and writing are my most constant companions. I walk for fun, logging miles while visiting the river and learning the landscape, and my idea of a wild time usually involves a new recipe. When I have more than one or two social engagements a week, I get a little cagey. More than one weekend a month away from home and my caginess turns a bit desperate, clawing a way back to solitude. 

This is not to say I don’t love travel or people or hosting or being in community. I love all of these, and I love them deeply. I just can’t indulge them day after day, week after week without taking equal or double as much time to recover at home, quiet and alone. 

A friend once said to me, “You and I could learn a lesson or two from her,” referring to a third friend who was, at the time, traveling nearly every week for a new adventure. And I get it. Both the solitary life and the still life often look mundane from the outside. Mundane enough that, when paired together, others can find the choice difficult to comprehend. Perhaps the still, solitary life can even look like settling, especially for someone like me in a dual-income household with few responsibilities and no kids. But there is a vast difference between settling and simply being content. It might be hard to believe, but I *like* staying still, especially at home, in my own space with its ordinary, familiar rhythms and routines.

And yet when the mundane bits of my life come in contrast with someone else’s seemingly bigger and better bits, the familiar devil of comparison can make me lose the thread of my desire. I worry for a minute or an hour or even a day that maybe indeed I should be wanting something different. 

Years ago, I read an essay on determining the kind of life you want, and it briefly touched on how it was okay and enough and good to want just a simple life. It so impressed upon me that I got quiet in myself and shut out all the noise from all the sources that said all the things about what I should want (a booming career! lots of money! a gaggle of kids! meaningful influence! a stamped passport! even more money!). I traveled deep into the cave of myself to ask myself what I wanted, what I really wanted. I found answers there that have guided me ever since—answers that were mostly simple and forever leading back to the simplest of them all: to be at peace and content. 

This is where I return to in those moments of worry that come after someone evaluates my life and finds it wanting. I put myself in bed at the end of a good day, dark room, quiet space, with a content heart, and then I ask, “What did you do today to come into rest with such peace?” I write out the list and almost always it contains the same consistent elements: solitude, nature, movement, quiet, words both read and written, reflection, and time in the kitchen. Anything different and the peace disappears, contentment turns cagey. 

We each have the beautiful freedom to live life in an infinite number of ways, to design it according to our deepest desires. So long as we have peace about our choices when it’s just us, alone and quiet at the end of the day, outside noise gone, true self laid bare, others’ expectations, choices, and evaluations matter not. What a horror it would be then to limit ourselves to their imagination.