What Would It Take To Be Moved by Your Own Life?

What would it take for you to be moved by your own life?

In this deeply reflective episode, I revisit a piece I first wrote in 2019—a time when I was beginning to question the life I had been told I was supposed to live.

We talk about losing our childhood curiosity, conforming to expectations, fear, regret, compassion, grief, and the courage it takes to choose a life that actually feels like your own.

I also reflect on the animals who have changed me, especially Herbert, whose death taught me that love is always worth the risk—even when we know it will eventually hurt.

Seven years later, I understand this piece differently.

I no longer believe strength means becoming harder.

Sometimes strength is remaining soft.

Sometimes it is loving anyway.

Sometimes it is refusing to look away when another living being is hurting.

And sometimes living differently begins with one simple question:

When my life is over, will I recognize it as mine?

🎵 Background music: “I Walk With Ghosts” by Scott Buckley, used under CC BY 4.0.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:16

Looking back now, I realized I was only beginning to. We are all giving these incredible opportunities to live our lives differently. Yet so often, there is something inside us holding us back. Call it insecurity, call it fear, call it conditioning, call it the voice we inherited from somebody else that eventually became so familiar we mistook it for our own. Somewhere along the way, something takes hold of us. It dulls the sparkle we once used to look at the world with. Remember that version of yourself? The one with wide eyes. The one who asked too many questions. The one who wanted to know why the sky looked the way it did, where animals went when they died, what was hiding underneath rocks, what happened if you mix this with that, and why adults seem to have so many rules for things that didn't make any sense. Children are naturally curious. They haven't yet learned that curiosity can make other people uncomfortable. I was that child, always getting into things, always making messes, always wandering towards something that caught my attention. I think some part of me always knew I was destined to walk a different path. And for a while, I didn't care what anybody thought about it. The world was my oyster and all that jazz. Until it wasn't. Somewhere along the way, I began conforming to what I believed reality was supposed to look like. Wake up, work, eat, sleep, repeat. Don't ask too many questions, don't dream too loudly, don't expect too much. And whatever you do, don't imagine that life might be something more. Dreams become something we associated with childhood. Something adorable when you're eight and embarrassing when you're 40. What do you want to be when you grow up? We ask children this constantly. Then somewhere along the way, we stop asking adults what they still want to become. Apparently, at some invisible age, you're supposed to have figured everything out. Your dreams are expected to evaporate quietly into the atmosphere while responsibilities take their place. But dreams don't disappear that easily. Sometimes they become rain. They follow you. They fall quietly over different parts of your life. Sometimes they arrive a sadness you can't explain, restlessness, jealousy towards someone who had the courage to do something you secretly wanted to do. A nagging little voice whispering, What if? What if you had tried? What if you had gone? What if you had said yes? What if you had been brave enough to disappoint everybody except yourself? That question can haunt a person because there are forces in this world that benefit from us being too tired to ask it. Too overwhelmed to imagine something better, too beaten down to believe we can live differently. Eventually, we begin calling the things we never challenge destiny. We say, that's just the way life is. Until something changed direction. It felt like a gust of wind caught the sails of my life and started turning me back toward myself. And strangely enough, I began thinking about school. I love school. I love learning. I love being exposed to ideas, cultures, people, histories, and possibilities I didn't know existed. Education should open us. It should introduce us to enough of the world that we can begin figuring out what makes our heart sing. But somewhere along the way, many of us receive another lesson too. There's a correct path. Pick something practical. Get a job. Make money. Build the life you're supposed to build. And if your heart happens to sing somewhere outside of that path, maybe ignore it. The farther we travel away from ourselves, the harder it becomes to recognize the person staring back from the mirror. What do you see when you look at yourself? Grey hairs? Wrinkles? A changing body? Evidence that time has been moving whether you were paying attention or not. Does aging frighten you because of what you see? Or because of what you haven't done? Imagine yourself at 80. If you're fortunate enough to make it there, what will matter? Will you care about the wrinkles? Or will you wonder why you spent so many years worrying about them? Will you remember how much money you made? Or the people you loved? Will you think about the things you owned? Or the moments when you had a chance to be compassionate and chose not to? Will you remember how others treated you? Or will you have to reckon with how you treated them? And what about the animals who shared this planet with us? Will we look back and wonder why it took humanity so long to understand that suffering matters even when the one suffering cannot speak our language? I think regret becomes frightening because eventually time removes our ability to bargain with it. We cannot keep saying, one day, at some point, one day becomes yesterday. The original version of this piece was written during a period of enormous uncertainty in Alberta. People were frightened about jobs, healthcare, education, the economy, and what the future might hold. There was anger everywhere, fears everywhere. People were tired, and beneath all of it was something I still recognize today. People wanted to know whether their lives mattered, whether their voices mattered, whether anyone was listening. That feeling hasn't disappeared. Maybe it never will. There will always be systems larger than us. Governments, corporations, institutions, expectations, circumstances we cannot control. But I no longer believe that means we are powerless over the meaning of our own lives. I used to think living a long life was the greatest indication of a life well lived. Now I don't think length tells us very much at all. A person can live 90 years without ever truly allowing themselves to be alive. I also used to want everybody to like me. I let the fear of rejection influence who I thought I needed to become. And that is an exhausting way to live. Because when everybody gets a vote and eventually you disappear from your own life. One of the ideas that stay with me from how to headburn was the notion of thinking of yourself as interesting, not superior, not better than anyone. Interesting. That idea changed something for me. Because interesting doesn't have to mean glamorous. It doesn't have to mean famous. It doesn't have to mean having stories that impress people at dinner parties. You get to define what interesting means. So ask yourself, what would it take for you to be moved by your own life? That's the question I keep returning to. What would make you wake up and think, I can't believe I get to experience this? Maybe it's traveling, maybe it's art, maybe it's writing, maybe it's building something, maybe it's rescuing animals, maybe it's raising children, maybe it's planting a garden nobody but you will ever admire. Maybe it's becoming brave enough to finally say yes. Maybe it's loving something even though you know losing it will hurt. That last one changed me. I have learned that I love taking photographs that capture the way the world feels to me. I love creating, I love friendship, I love recklessly when it comes to animals. And yes, loving animals means accepting heartbreak as part of the deal. Every animal who comes into my life arrives with an invisible clock. I don't know how much time we have. None of us do. But knowing that the goodbye is coming doesn't make the love less worthwhile. It makes the love more important. I still hold on to the belief that perhaps there is something beyond all this. And if there is, I like to imagine that the animals we have loved somehow find us again. Maybe that belief is faith. Maybe it is grief. Maybe it is simply what my heart needs. I've also learned something else since writing this in 2019. I am afraid of death. Not necessarily because I'm afraid of what happens to me. I am afraid of separation. I am afraid of leaving behind the beings I love. I'm afraid of them leaving me. And yet the greatest tragedy isn't loving something and eventually losing it. The greater tragedy would be refusing to love because you were afraid of the ending. Love is always a risk. But it is still worth taking. That lesson became painfully clear to me through Herbert. One of my greatest regrets was not being inside the veterinarian office when he was helped across the Rainbow Bridge. For a long time I wish I had been stronger. I wish I had held him as he took his last breath. I wish I had looked into his eyes one more time. I wished I had kept my hands on him until there was nothing left to hold on to. You cannot rewrite those moments. Grief doesn't give us that privilege. But sometimes regret becomes a teacher. Herbert taught me something in death that I don't think I fully understood while he was alive. Presence matters. Compassion matters. Every life matters. Maybe that is part of why my world became so filled with animals afterward. Maybe some part of me wanted to prove to him that his life had changed mine. That he wasn't simply here and then gone. That something remained. And that doesn't make love foolish. It makes love courageous. I used to believe strength meant becoming harder. Now I believe strength can look like remaining soft in a world that constantly gives you reasons not to. To witness suffering and still choose compassion, to experience loss and still choose love. To be betrayed and still refuse to become cruel. To understand how badly life can hurt and still decide that tenderness matters. That is strength too. Maybe even the greater kind. I once wrote that my purpose was to absorb enough pain so other people wouldn't have to. I would change that now. I don't think any of us are meant to carry everyone else's pain. But I do believe we can sit beside it, we can witness it, we can lighten it, we can make another person or another living being feel us alone inside of it. That might be compassion in its simplest form. Not fixing, not saving the entire world, just refusing to look away. Maybe my purpose isn't to heal the whole world. Maybe none of ours is. Maybe we heal the tiny corner of it that reaches us. The animal placed in our arms. The person who tells us they're hurting. The child asking a question nobody answered for us. The stranger who needs kindness. And maybe, little by little, that is how the world changes. Not through one enormous act, through millions of small moments where somebody decides, I will not harden. I will not stop caring. I will not allow fear to decide the entire shape of my life. Seven years after writing the first version of this, I don't think living differently means escaping responsibility. I think it means becoming conscious of why we are living the way we are. Choosing what matters instead of simply inheriting somebody else's definition of success. Taking the photograph, writing the story, loving the animal, calling the friend, changing direction, trying the thing that frightens you, being curious again. And remembering that the child you once were, the one staring at the world with those enormous curious eyes, is probably still somewhere inside you, waiting, not asking you to become younger, just asking you to become alive again. So maybe the question isn't, how long will I live? Maybe the better question is when my life is over, will I recognize it as mine? And until then, what would it take for me to be moved by my own life?