So many of us live in a waiting room. We’ll be happy when the house is bigger, when the job is better, when the body looks different, when the plan finally comes together. Meanwhile, the life we’re actually living slips by, quietly, one ordinary day at a time.
Writer Carrie Marie Bush captures the antidote in a beautiful passage that begins: “Fall in love with the life you’re living before it looks the way you imagined.”
Presence Over Perfection
One of the lines in her piece invites us to “Fall in love with choosing presence over perfection, and gratitude over more.” That might be the whole lesson in a single sentence.
Perfection is always somewhere else. Presence is always right here. Gratitude doesn’t require more money, more time, or more achievements. It only asks you to notice what’s already in front of you.
Slowing Down Long Enough to Hear Yourself
Bush writes about falling in love with “slowing down long enough to hear your own thoughts again” and with “becoming someone who isn’t always in a hurry.” In a world of constant notifications, that kind of stillness can feel almost rebellious.
Slowing down doesn’t mean doing nothing. It means doing fewer things with more attention: one conversation without checking your phone, one meal eaten slowly, one walk where you actually look around.
The Ordinary Moments
Her passage also reminds us that ordinary moments “quietly become the ones you’ll miss most.” The coffee on a slow morning. The car ride with a song you both know. The kitchen conversation that runs long. These aren’t the background of a good life. They are the good life.
Changing How You Look
She encourages us to fall in love with changing our minds, beginning again, and trusting ourselves a little more, and with looking up at the sky instead of down at our phones. Then she lands on a gentle truth: sometimes “all that changes is how we look, and suddenly everything feels different.”
Simple Ways to Start
- Name one thing you love about today, exactly as it is.
- Look up. Leave your phone in your pocket for one full walk.
- Trade one “I’ll be happy when” for one “I’m grateful now.”
- End the day with one line of gratitude. Write down a single ordinary moment you want to remember.
Your life doesn’t have to look the way you imagined to be worth loving. As Bush puts it, maybe that is enough. Maybe that is all it takes.
Related reading: The Wisdom of Slowing Down and Embracing the Present: Heaven Is Now.
