Yesterday I missed the markings on a bendy road in the dark, drove through a red light and stopped in the middle of the road, not realising that I was meant to stop 50 metres behind where I was. Then I had to reverse 50 metres in front of 4 lanes of oncoming traffic stopped at the lights.

I pretended I knew what I was doing.

I clearly didn’t.

It has come to my attention that none of us know what the hell we’re doing 99.7% of the time. We spend much of our energy pretending to know what we’re doing, but we’re mostly looking around at what everyone else is doing to make sure we’re on the right track. Some people seem to know what they’re doing, so we follow them, but they’re probably following someone else, and god knows who’s at the front of this long train of people following each other towards this place that we hope is called Fulfilment and Happiness.

The locals call it Fulpiness for short. But no one seems clear on how to know when we’ve arrived.

There’s a lot of “Are we THERE yet??”.

Every milestone looks like it might be the place, but every milestone we reach fades quickly as we rush off towards the next.

We can very easily go through life like a bug in a rug (being snug), living inside the boundaries of our comfort zone. Spending all our time in a sensible career that we don’t really love, striving to do just enough to stay on top of things, living within our limits, not daring to stick our neck out too far, daring a little but not a lot.

But is there really any point to that?

Will we get to 90 and look back and think, I’m glad I didn’t try too many things. I’m glad I never failed and never took any risks. I’m glad my life looked similar to everyone else’s. I’m glad I didn’t travel too much. I’m glad I worked my whole life in a job I didn’t love so that people would think I was sensible and smart. Thank god I played it safe.

I think we’re all clear that that’s not what we want. Yet we still play our game in the very small confines of our comfort zone. We’re just hitting the ball along the ground because we fear that if we try to hit too many 6’s, someone might catch us out. Better to get runs than to be caught out right?

Except that in the game of life, the game isn’t over when someone catches you out.

It cracks on, and you’ve learnt something new, every time.

Life is about experiencing life. We can live, or we can live a bloody good life.

We can have porn-star-average sex or phenomenal sex, we can have an ok career or an epic career, we can have reasonable health or radiating-sequins health.

The difference between the formers and the latters is growth and mastery. To master new things we have to step out of our comfort zone, try new things, balls them up and then do them again until we’re a master.

That’s how kids learn and grow.

We weren’t born knowing everything, we tried things and failed and then tried them again.

We weren’t afraid of failing, so we kept trying and learning and growing and mastering. It was exciting and emotional and up and down and we loved it.

Until somewhere along the line our mind became more active and made us feel like failure was the worst thing in the world. We started to feel like everyone else always knew what they were doing so we started to pretend we knew what we were doing too.

So if you secretly don’t know what you’re doing in life, just do lots of things.

Do things until you find things you love doing, do them even when you’re shit at them, keep doing them until you’re a pro. And then find some new things to do, and by the end of your life, you will have done lots of cool things, and you will have lived a life worth living.

Happiness comes from GROWTH which comes from CHANGE and EXPLORING and LEARNING. It’s in our nature to want to better ourselves constantly – it’s just that we’ve all got sidetracked with the career/ money side of things, and forgotten that we love to grow in other areas, too.

Take a little stocktake – which areas of your life could do with a bit of exploration and growth? Where are you taking the road well travelled, where are you playing safe?

Sex? Job? Relationships? Friendships? Health? Fitness? Nutrition? Mind health?

This is what Project Self is about. Looking at ALL the puzzle pieces that make up our lives and working out how we can make each one more bloody good and less “Yea, fine thanks”.

+ Interwoven with the fabric of mindfulness, so that we can appreciate the whole puzzle exactly as it is on any given day, scattered or intact.

It’s about mastering the art of living a bloody good life.

If you’re feeling like life is passing you by unmastered while you tread water (Egg beater legs, egg beater legs!! Faster!), check this out. You might find something you didn’t realise you were looking for.