“You have this one life. How do you want to spend it? Apologizing? Regretting? Questioning? Hating yourself? Dieting? Running after people who don’t see you? Be brave. Believe in yourself. Do what feels good. Take risks. You have this one life. Make yourself proud.”
—Beardsley Jones

omeone recently asked me, “What constitutes a life well-lived?”

My immediate inner response was, “One in which the voices aren’t beating me up on my last breath.” It made me pause because of how profound that was to me. Picture it: Living a life where I don’t have to question my integrity. I don’t have to memorize lies I’ve been telling myself, I don’t have to cover my tracks, I don’t have to hide things in the closet, so I won’t be found out.

In fact, if I were to take inventory, my whole purpose since leaving the monastery has been to serve and to live harmlessly. My day-to-day practice is to live a life that doesn’t give the voices ammunition to take me down in ANY moment.

Does that mean I’m doing perfectly? Far from it. What it does give me is a focus and a HOW for living life. So I can ask myself, “Is what I’m doing leading away from suffering or toward suffering?”

In my Zen training, I learned the principle, “Leave not a trace.”

Part of that entailed tidying up my meditation area after sitting so that it was better than I found it, putting away all tools after each use, and cleaning dishes as I went into the kitchen. But it also included cleaning up Karma. Leave not a trace was a metaphor for not leaving crap behind for others to deal with either physically or energetically. If I make a mess, I vow to clean it up.

It’s to find all the areas in my life in which I’m not free and to work toward becoming free there.

Because you never know when that moment of death is going to come. And you want to be prepared.

Zen practice is a preparation for death. It’s striving to attain freedom in every moment and in that focus, being free in every moment.

“Am I living a well-lived life NOW?”

“How about now?”

“Now?”