What Makes a Big Life?

What Makes Big Life?

For many years now, fascinated by the power of love, the transformations of loss and the nature of resilience, I've been pondering big lives vs small lives. Let the record show that right now, I prefer a big life. However, I am trying not to be in any way judgemental in my musings. I think at various points we all might pull back from a larger life or expand out into a bigger life. Nothing about life should be stagnant. Change is inevitable and this fluidity of circumstance makes us human. 

So what constitutes a big life or a small life? I think each person probably has to answer this for themselves. This muddies the waters considerably. Jeremy Goldberg said, "Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard". That pretty much sums it up. 

I guess, what I really want to do, is to determine what a big or small life means to me. So, maybe I can reassure myself that I'm choosing the one I really want. 

My uncle is headed for a nursing home in two days. He has never had children or a significant other. Relationships with his brother, my dad, and the rest of our family have never been more than awkwardly cordial. He has no hobbies, other than reading the newspaper. He has one friend, a former coworker who borrowed money from my uncle to begin a business. Whether this dynamic impacts the parameters of the friendship, I do not know. 

Despite smoking for over fifty years, eating poorly and never participating in any form of exercise, he was relatively healthy until a few months ago. When his health began to fail, he did nothing to participate in his own recovery. He's spent his entire life savings on round the clock caregivers. While not wealthy by some standards, he certainly had more money in his bank account than I ever had in mine. Now it's gone. The caregivers were lovely people. But the three months that savings kept him in his home, seem perhaps like money anticlimacticly spent. 

I feel that his was a small life. Why? I think a life is small when you do not try new things or risk failing. As a popular meme says, "when was the last time you were brave enough to suck at something new?" A life is small in my opinion, when you do not open your heart to love. A life is small when you have made no lasting impression and left no legacy. A legacy might be as small as always making someone laugh or as large as changing the world. 

Last week, I made a decision not to return to a job I've held for almost five years. I have family commitments which require my attention and will require even more in short order. But there are other even more personal reasons for not going back. It's time to pursue some dreams in a much more serious way because nobody gets promised a tomorrow. 

The first few months of 2020 have been strange for most of us. Introverts joked that they'd been training for quarantine and social distancing their whole lives. Not me. I'm a social person who loves people. I struggled. Hard. I got really depressed. Bottomed out. 

But this decision to step out into the unknown has entirely shifted my energy. Despite the fact that everything about my future is uncertain, I am calm and grounded yet excited about the possibilities.  It turns out you can fool yourself. You can believe you were living a big life when really it was quite small.