What Are You Filling Your Life With?

On Saturday evening, I was reading at Mass.

I do this every few weeks, and earlier in the day I had been practising the second reading at home. It was a passage from St Paul’s letter to the Philippians, and although I had read it several times while preparing, there was something in it that kept catching my attention.

It was the part about what we choose to think about: the things that are true and good, right and just, lovely and worthy of our attention.

I thought about it for a little while and then, as you do, got on with the rest of my Saturday.

That evening, our usual parish priest was away and a priest from a neighbouring parish was celebrating Mass. During his homily, he came back to that same reading and talked about it in a way that made me look at it slightly differently.

And I had one of those little moments I love, when somebody says something you may have heard in one form or another many times before, but for whatever reason, this time it lands.

His interpretation was, of course, rooted in faith and prayer. But sitting there listening, I found myself thinking about it in the context of ordinary life.

Because, religious or not, there was a question in there that I think is worth asking:

What are we filling our lives with?

We are very good at looking for what needs fixing

There is no shortage of encouragement to examine our lives. We assess our habits, our homes, our bodies, our finances, our relationships, our productivity and our screen time. We declutter, organise and set goals. We decide what we need to stop doing, spend less time on, eat less of, buy less of or worry less about.

And I’m not particularly against any of that. I’ve written about plenty of it myself. Sometimes we really do need to look honestly at something that isn’t working and change it.

But I wonder whether we spend so much time looking for what is wrong that we forget to examine what is good.

Not simply, What should I take out of my life?

But what do I want to put into it?

And perhaps, even more importantly, what is already good that I haven’t been paying enough attention to?

Where was the good today?

There is a tradition in the Catholic faith of looking back over your day. Its religious meaning goes considerably deeper than what I’m going to talk about here, but it was part of what our visiting priest spoke about on Saturday evening, and one part of the idea stayed with me.

What if, at the end of an ordinary day, instead of immediately thinking about everything we didn’t manage to do, everything that went wrong or everything waiting for us tomorrow, we ran the day back through our minds and looked for the good?

Where was I kind? Where was somebody kind to me? What did I enjoy? What was beautiful? When did I laugh? When did I feel most like myself? What did I do that mattered? What did I give my attention to that genuinely deserved it?

And perhaps most interestingly:

What happened today that I would quite like a little more of in my life?

I particularly like that question.

Because this isn’t really about making a list of nice things and congratulating ourselves for noticing them. It’s about learning something from the lives we’re already living.

If one of the best parts of my day was twenty minutes sitting at the kitchen table talking to one of my children, that’s worth knowing. If getting outside for a walk changed the entire feel of my afternoon, that’s worth knowing too. If I finally rang somebody I’d been meaning to ring and came away feeling glad that I had, there’s something in that.

And if I spent forty minutes reading other people’s arguments online and emerged irritated about something that had absolutely nothing to do with my actual life — well, that’s information too.

Not another reason to tell myself off. Just something worth noticing.

Because once we notice these things, we have choices.

Good doesn’t necessarily mean happy

I think this is an important distinction.

When we talk about filling our lives with good things, it’s very easy for that to become another version of just think positively.

That isn’t what I mean at all.

There are times when life is difficult. People become ill. Relationships struggle. Money causes worry. Children have problems we can’t solve for them. People we love get older. Work becomes difficult. We lose people. The news can be frightening. Sometimes we wake up worried and go to bed worried despite doing everything we’re supposedly meant to do in between.

We can’t arrange our lives beautifully enough to prevent any of that. And I certainly don’t believe that anxiety or genuine difficulty disappears because we go for a walk, light a candle or bake an apple crumble.

But perhaps filling a life with good things isn’t about making the difficult things disappear.

Perhaps it’s about making sure they aren’t the only things there.

And “good” doesn’t necessarily mean pleasant either.

Sometimes the good thing is having the difficult conversation. Sometimes it’s apologising. Sometimes it’s doing what is fair when doing something else would be easier. It’s keeping a promise, showing up, making dinner when you’re exhausted or sitting beside somebody who is having an awful time when there is absolutely nothing you can say to make it better.

It can be doing something useful. Making something. Helping someone. Being honest. Letting another person talk when your instinct is to jump in with your own opinion.

Good can be laughter and music and beautiful autumn walks and dinner with people we love. But it can also be decency, fairness, courage, patience and doing the right thing when nobody else will ever know that we did.

That’s a much bigger definition of a good life.

What gets our attention gets part of our life

There’s another side to all of this that I’ve been thinking about.

So much of what fills our days now gets there without us ever consciously choosing it.

We pick up our phones for one reason and twenty minutes later we’re reading an argument between two complete strangers. We consume bad news from places thousands of miles away alongside terrible news from much closer to home. We see other people’s houses, holidays, clothes, opinions, careers and families.

We’re advertised to constantly. Everybody has a take. Everything seems to require a reaction. There is always another notification, another story, another video, another problem we are apparently supposed to know about.

I don’t think the answer is to throw our phones into the sea and retreat from modern life. I’m rather fond of mine, for a start.

But attention is finite.

And if something is taking our attention, it is taking up some part of our life.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve become increasingly interested not just in what I need less of, but in what I deliberately want more of.

More conversations that go somewhere. More time outside. More things made with my hands. More meals around the table. More reading, laughter, music and curiosity. More people who leave me feeling better for having spent time with them. More moments when I am actually where I am, rather than physically sitting in one place while my attention is somewhere entirely different.

Not because those things will create a life in which nothing goes wrong.

But because they are part of the life I want to be living while everything else is happening too.

Perhaps autumn makes us notice

When we came out of Mass on Saturday evening, it was about half past seven and completely dark.

It always catches me slightly at this time of year. Only a few weeks ago, the same journey home would have been made in daylight. Now the evenings are closing in, the lamps are going on earlier and home begins to feel like the centre of things again.

There is something about these darker months that seems to turn us inward a little. Not necessarily in a gloomy way. Perhaps we simply have a little more opportunity to notice.

What would you like a little more of?

I don’t think we need another complicated system for living well.

I’m increasingly suspicious of anything that requires seventeen steps, a new notebook and a morning routine beginning at 5.15am.

But I do think I’m going to try something very simple.

At the end of an ordinary day, I’m going to occasionally ask myself three questions:

What was good today?

What deserved my attention?

What would I like to make a little more room for tomorrow?

Not every night. Not as another habit to maintain or another thing to get right. Just often enough to notice.

Because maybe a good life isn’t something we finally arrive at when we’ve eliminated everything difficult, organised everything properly and fixed all the parts of ourselves we think need improving.

Perhaps it’s much more ordinary than that.

Perhaps it’s noticing what is already good. Choosing what deserves our attention. Putting more kindness, fairness, beauty, friendship, usefulness, laughter, creativity and love into the spaces where we can.

And when life is difficult — as it inevitably sometimes will be — continuing to make a little room for good things alongside it.

Not because they make the difficult things disappear.

But because the difficult things don’t deserve to have all the room.

Maybe one of the ways we build a good life is simply by noticing the good when it’s there — and then making a little more room for it tomorrow.

Chat soon,

Ciara x

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