Living. Heart and Soul.
The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Personal Development
“Life? Don’t talk to me about life.”
So said Marvin the Paranoid Android in Douglas Adams’ “Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Marvin was a terminally depressed robot whose morose, relentlessly negative attitude to life brought new depths of misery and despair to all who encountered him.
Fortunately, most of us don’t spend our entire lives plumbing such depths. We do, however, sometimes find ourselves looking at our life and thinking, “is this it? Surely, there must be more to life than this? Surely, there must be more to me than this?”
There’s a nagging feeling that life is unsatisfactory in some, or even many, ways. You might have all the trappings of what contemporary society tells us make up the “good life”: a well-paying job, a nice home on a quarter-acre block in the suburbs, a quarter-acre TV in your home theatre, a late-model car, and so on. But somehow, even though you worked hard for these things, it still feels like there’s something missing.
Perhaps you’ve watched one of those so-called “reality” TV shows where participants escape from the modern world, living wild, free and self-sufficient in the great outdoors, or taking off to sail the oceans in a tiny boat, and you’ve felt a wistful desire to be like them.
Perhaps life’s ups and downs are becoming more down than up, and you’re feeling increasingly desperate; life sucks, but you can’t explain why and you don’t know how to change it.
Perhaps you’ve had a sudden, strong desire to quit your well-paid, nine-to-five job, sell everything and just take off. Become an artist, or a musician, or an intrepid explorer, an astronaut, a professional golf player, an award-winning author.
You fantasise about it for a while, but then reality kicks in. You have responsibilities. You have to keep a roof over your head, food on the table, pay the bills, put on a brave face and keep on keeping on because that’s life. Isn’t it?
You’re stuck.
Is this really it? Is this all there is to your life? Is it all there will ever be? Is there nothing you can do except put up, shut up and get on with it? Will you – perish the thought! – one day find yourself on your death bed thinking, “was that it?”
In short, no, this is not it. Your life can be different. You can change it, if you want to.