Luke's Guide to Extraordinary Living

Let’s face it, life is drab. Real life, that is. Sure, there’s lots of excitement, humor, and drama on TV, but it can only come portioned in 30-minute or one-hour chunks. Real life is almost depressingly boring.

What do I mean? Boring is getting up, showering, going to a job, coming home, eating, sleeping, doing it again. Boring is looking back over the last three weeks and realizing that you don’t have one distinct memory out of the entire block of time. Boring is listening to radio, or reading the news, or watching TV, just looking for something to get worked up about.

Like I said, drab. Plain. Muted.

In fact, in most work places I’ve been at they actually encourage drabness. There was one office I worked at that literally had a policy that you couldn’t hang things on the cubicle walls because it ruined the “sound absorption qualities” of the cubicles.

I know most of us have come to accept that there is a certain amount of routine required for living, that in order to survive you have to have a paycheck, and in order to get a paycheck you’re going to have to get a job. The dullness just goes with the territory. You can have your fun on the weekends and holidays. I know most of us have come to accept that, but I believe it’s a very reluctant acceptance.

I think really we long to be free. We long to do something with our lives that makes us excited. We want to feel passionate about what we are doing. We know there has to be some way life can be more vivid, more inspired. We ache for the rewards of a life that has meaning to it, that can take our breath away with beauty and pierce our hearts with tragedy. We are tired of being numb.

But, we quickly let the sound absorption qualities of our cubicles stifle those thoughts, because immediately following them is a fear. A very subtle fear invades us when we start thinking about freedom and purpose. It’s not the kind of fear you would expect, not the “How would I pay the bills?” or “I have responsibilities, I can’t just let everyone down” type of fears. Those are simply the clothes we dress the fear up in. Those are the sensible words we use to cover up the fear that really eats at our souls. The real fear, the one we hardly ever truly address, is this: that there is nothing greater - that this dull reality is all there is, and that if we were to go crazy and risk everything for our dream of extraordinary living, we would find that it was all just a pipe dream and that extraordinary life doesn’t exist.

You see, as long as we don’t put extraordinary living to the test, we can at least hope that it’s out there somewhere. The hope - that maybe one day we will stumble into it, that the perfect job will come along, or we’ll marry the right person, or win the lottery, or invent something that will make us millionaires overnight - that hope keeps us alive and gives us the motivation to push through the dullness day after day after day. Without that hope, we have to face the awful truth that we are half-dead already.

So, is it out there? Can you truly live an extraordinary life?

Yes.

How? I aim to show you. In the next series of entries I will reveal a simple - yet difficult - guide to extraordinary living. It’s more possible than you ever imagined.

Stay tuned…