Living a Full Life

Living a full life for many of us means having a big family with close ties, lots of friends and acquaintances, enjoying extensive world travel, and being well read. Some feel a full life is one relatively free of disappointment and pain.

To me, a full life means a life filled with ups and downs, coupled with a wide variety of activities and experiences. It’s the bad or less desirable that allows me to swoon over all the good. And who needs to label anyway?

Many seniors don’t expect to experience a full life once we’re old and settled into a less productive and less rigorous life. There could be nothing further from the truth. But if you want a fuller life, there is a little work involved. And, as always, effort, or ‘a little work,’ is the difference between what we have and what we wish we had.

Being open is key

A full life is one that is open. It’s open to new experiences and new ways of thinking and of doing things. A mind that is closed to a wider range of possibilities is a less than full life; it is curtailed and cut off from other ways of seeing life and living. In this way, travel is good for expanding our lives, but travel isn’t necessary to consider your life rich and full. Having an open mind, being willing to see a different side, being willing to be vulnerable and open to being wrong or uneducated about something makes our world expand into new possibilities.

Expanding the possibilities

A full life is all about possibilities. Taking whatever risks to see what might be expands our world to include something we may have felt negatively about earlier in our lives. Admitting our thoughts may be limiting our lives is the first step in expanding our world and the way we are in it. Hopefully, we’re no longer afraid to say, “Oh, I was wrong,” or “Nope, I was right to think that way.”

At no other time in our lives has the need and desire to acknowledge the expanse of our lives been more important. It feels like the world or ‘them,’ or ‘out there,’ want to limit us and our happiness. We do it to ourselves, folks!

Are you able to feel content in most of your life? Does your happiness include new experiences, new people, new ways of thinking? Are you open to greater possibilities?

Is your life full? What will it take to expand it further?