What is the story of your unlived life?

Hello there. It’s a new month, but I’m not here to tell you that. Though it’s a bit shocking, we are almost in 2022. Do you, like me, still think of last year as being 2019? It makes me think of our relationship with the concept of time. It might be because this quote from psychoanalyst Adam Phillips keeps ringing inside of me “There is always what will turn out to be the life we lead, and the life that accompanied it, the parallel life (or lives) that never actually happened, that we live in our minds, thewished-for life (or lives): therisks untaken and theopportunities avoided or unprovided. We refer to them as our unlived lives because somewhere we believe that they were open to us; but for some reason - and we might spend a great deal of our lived lives trying to find and give the reason - they were not possible. And what was not possible all too easily becomes the story of our lives.” It felt as if I was handed a pair of parachutes or why not to say, a pair of wings. To name theparallel version of ourselves is, I believe, a reconciliation of what needs our attention and I’d say nurture, too. Bear with me, this whole thing might sound complex or actually really simple, I guess it depends from where we stand, but it’s definitely an invitation, as he says, worth examining.

in which it  will be pointing to what we long for, what is absent. And why could that be helpful? Because it’s the dissatisfaction, the discomfort, the suffering that makes us who we are, as well. We notice how much we dwell on it, even in the mundane moments, in our thoughts, in the roads not taken, the regrets. This observation is not to make us realize a pessimistic imbalance between our real experiences and the ones we haven’t had fully or a perpetual sense of falling short or to engage in a delusional self project of “improvement” - a task that is both impossible and cruel to us. Rather, this examination can help us to become aware of the capacity we have to belong to this version of ourselves, the one that didn’t get to do/be/accomplish. And in this process, bring what we carry in the shadows to the surface. Make it alive in us, take up the space it needs to coexist within us. As if we are allowing ourselves to be both the real and the unreal, the presence and the absence, thedream and the realization. Because one thing, especially in these almost past two years has showed, it’s that the more certain we are of anything, the more uncertain we should be. To me, this is also a journey of self compassion.

With love,
Mari