The Unlived Life

There’s a life you can imagine for yourself, but you’re not living it.

Glimpses of it come from time to time. Little flashes before we fall asleep or as the water hits us in the shower.

It’s the vision of writing a novel. Of turning on the light to your restaurant instead of your windowless office. Of walking into the gym to greet a client instead of drinking Keurig coffee in your cubicle under a beaming fluorescent light.

Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art that, “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us.”

The life we live is the one in which we do what we have to do. We go to work, pay our bills and show up on Thanksgiving.

The unlived life within us is who we could be. It’s our untapped potential.

What Holds Us Back

We have a tendency to look at those living our unlived life and focus on the reasons why it wouldn’t work for us.

The most powerful man of his time, Marcus Aurelius, felt it too. “If you find something very difficult to achieve yourself, don’t imagine it impossible – for anything possible and proper for another person can be achieved as easily by you,” he wrote to himself in Meditations.

If the emperor of Rome needed this reminder, then so do we.

We idolize instead of remembering that those we strive to emulate are human.

We discover an athlete we want to be like and instead of following their running regiment, we buy one of their hats.

We tend to overestimate others and underestimate ourselves. We discard our ideas because they’re ours. We choose not to trust ourselves.

If it’s been done, you can do it too.

“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” – Epictetus

We see someone else executing on the dream we have for ourselves, and we put them on a pedestal. We start looking for differences, advantages of theirs. Their mother was this, they went to this school. So and so was their next door neighbor.

We all start in different places. Accept that. You might have a longer and slower path than someone else, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start. Because what’s the alternative?

To slave away at something you don’t enjoy because you’ve already started? How sad to spend this one life watching someone live your unlived life. And you’re not watching because you weren’t good enough. You’re watching because you didn’t try. Zero shots on goal, but we somehow expect to score.

Going For It

In another one of his books, Turning Pro, Pressfield addresses the tendency to idolize, “In my experience, when we project a quality or virtue onto another human being, we ourselves almost always already possess that quality, but we’re afraid to embrace (and to live) that truth,” he wrote.

Trust the desire you have for this unlived life. It’s evidence that those qualities are in you somewhere. Don’t think about how others are going to react. Don’t think about how hard it’s doing to be. Don’t wait for permission.

“We must seize what flees,” the philosopher Seneca wrote in a letter to his friend Lucilius.

The time you have to seize the unlived life is fleeing.

“Let us therefore set out whole-heartedly, leaving aside our many distractions and exert ourselves in this single purpose, before we realize too late the swift and unstoppable flight of time,” Seneca continued.

When all else fails, remember that you will die.

The day you were born you also received a terminal diagnosis. They couldn’t give you a cause or a timeline, but they could give you a 100% guarantee that you were going to die.

One day, this is all going to end. What do you want to do between now and then?