A Half-Published Life

Recently I was doing some work on my book distribution.While I was hanging around the backend of Amazon, I was suddenly struck by the significance of the statement that was staring at me from the screen:

I laughed to myself and thought, ‘Well, that's pretty relevant to life, hey?’ Then I stopped. My amusement shifted to deep thought.

How many people are walking around with ideas that never make it into the real world?
How many actually show their full selves to the world, totally free of apology?
How much do we habitually hold inside that is begging to be realized and expressed?

In other words, unpublished changes. Changes we want to make, or yearn for, but never realize. Whether it’s fear of failure, or doubt in our abilities, or seemingly insurmountable circumstances, or myriad of other psychological barriers we can put in place for ourselves, many of us are used to never publishing our lives in full before we die.

As I write this, oddly enough, a song came on with uncannily appropriate lyrics:

This is why I love the question, What do you want to experience before you die?

It helps keep perspective on how we prioritize and show up for life. Many of the changes we want to make, and ways we crave to express ourselves, aren't as scary to embody as we fear they may be. We build up a whole lot of anticipation in our minds of what could go wrong before we ever take a chance and make it happen.

We never hit publish.

I don't want anyone here to live a half-published, or half-passionate, life. I want every single one of you to feel strong enough in yourself to take a chance and pursue what you love. So ask yourself what holds you back.

What’s the worst that can happen if you go for it? If you fall short along the way, you're still going to learn. If you fall down, it gives you something to laugh about as you brush yourself off and keep going. At best, you will step into a version of yourself that’s wildly, intoxicatingly genuine and alive. In my humble opinion, that’s worth the risk of learning some lessons along the way.

If you make a habit of laughing in the face of fear, creativity takes over and you realize there wasn't much to be afraid of to start with.

The one thing we should actually afraid of is letting this one, beautiful life pass before our eyes without fully embracing all the magic of creating what we truly want out of it.