By Adam Pearson
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If you don’t like the story of your life, make some changes and rewrite its future.

Drop the interpretations of its past and flow fresh and new like a child that has just learned to swim. Dive deep, alive, awake, and alert into the present unfolding of your life in this moment.

Feel the raw uncertainty of being alive and instead of letting it paralyze you, use it as fuel to drive and blast you forward, like a Saturn V rocket soaring into the sky.

Life is not confined to the dead stories about the past that inhabit our minds like uninvited squatters in unsold apartments. The stories–which are really just interpretations–are dead because there’s no life in them, except, that is, when you lend them your own.

Life doesn’t reside in the mind’s interpretations of what is, what was, and what may be. Life is the action of the now, the scene you’re in, the sensations in your body, the feelings in your heart. Life is here and only here. When life is, it’s now.

Whatever you’re waiting for or looking to get or become in order to be happy is just a story that your mind made up. None of it is real. What’s real is what’s here, now. This is your life. This moment. Not the ones in your imagination. And joy, freedom, and fulfillment are only available at one time and at one time only: now. 

The energy that is the vitality of your life has to go somewhere. Either the energy of your presence gets sucked into your mind’s interpretations or it gets released into the now to flood your present experience with awareness and vivacity.

When your attention is freed from entracement with mental interpretations, it can flow elsewhere: into the raw sensations of your body, the uninterpreted nakedness of your emotions, and the many-splendored hues, tones, touches, fragrances, and flavours that your senses afford.

Life doesn’t have to seem so dire and serious. We don’t have to live lives enslaved to dead interpretations of events that either never happened or are already over. Another option is possible.

We can ground ourselves in our lived reality in this moment and here, create openings–by doing new things, talking to new people, and putting ourselves out there–through which life can pour possibilities into our lives. New possibilities. Fresh diving boards into novel experience can take their stand where only the cobwebs of habits and memories once were. And from them, you can leap into the vibrancy of the unfamiliar.

If you want to live an adventure, then, feel the fear and dive into the unknown. Start somewhere so that something can happen. Be willing to make mistakes. Be willing to be embarrassed. Be willing to do whatever it takes. Just dive. And feel the exhilaration of a palpitating plummet into a new life.

Fall out of the old and into the new, not by chance, but intentionally. Swan dive into freedom.

You may have no idea what will happen when you do. Truly, you may be at a total loss. But that total loss will be your total gain. The scintillating excitement of not-knowing will pump energy into your life and accelerate the beating of your heart with the electrifying wonder of the new.

Yes, you may have no idea what will happen. But something will happen. And whatever it is, you can be sure of one thing: you won’t find yourself on your death bed wondering why you never had the courage to act, why you never chose adventure over the safety of the familiar and routine.

Of course, you’re not the sole author of your story; everyone and everything in the universe is coauthoring it along with you. Everything contributes to how this moment plays out with an infinite, ever-shifting tapestry of influences. But you can own your part in our story and give the universe something to work with.

All life needs is the slightest spark of willingness and action. It only takes a small spark to ignite a firework. When it goes coursing into the sky, no one may remember the spark it took to get it there. But they will see the blooming of fiery colour, the phantasmagoric plumes of brightness and beauty. They will see the light that poured out of a single bold move. A single spark.

And they’ll be awed by it, just as you, the igniter of the spark, will be.

Without that spark, a firework is just another object in a room, like an old newspaper on a shelf or a stone collected on a long-forgotten holiday.

With the spark, it is a spectacle, a flower made of fire, a chemical display of wonderment and awe projected on the canvas of a night-time sky.

What makes the difference?

Only a spark.

It only takes a spark.

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