I once had a yoga teacher who would talk about wanting a Life of Leisure. LOL, for short.
The concept of a LOL has always stuck with me and over the years I’ve tried to embody that idea in one form or another, with more success at certain points than others. Over time I’ve figured out some keys to the LOL, and turns out it involves more LOLs.
The Life Of Leisure
A Life of Leisure is not just lounging around by the pool all day, and it’s not a life without work. A Life of Leisure means that, to the best of your ability, life feels easy and expansive.
It means your work feels purposeful. It feels like what you want to do with your time, and what you’re meant to do with your time. You’re not constantly drained by all your obligations, so you’re up for most things on most days. You have the energy to do what you want, with the people you want to do it with, and the resources to accomplish your goals without a constant undercurrent of stress about money, time, or whether you have enough gas in the tank (literally and metaphorically).
For a lot of people, that probably sounds like a pipe dream. There have been plenty of times it feels that way to me. But a Life of Leisure doesn’t just happen to you. You make it happen. It’s a practice, like most things worth having.
So how do you practice it? Two ways I’ve found are Loving Out Loud and Living Out Loud.
Loving Out Loud
Loving Out Loud is active caring, for yourself and for the people around you. The key word is active. It happens in the open, where people can see, hear, and feel it.
It looks like:
- Acknowledging your friends and what they want, need, and like
- Knowing their allergies, their pain tolerances, their triggers, their life history
- Purposefully scooching over so the person who just joined your group knows they have a place here too
- Ordering your friend’s favorite drink for them because they’re running late and everyone else is already ordering
- Speaking up for your friends when they aren’t there to do it themselves
- Speaking up for yourself when there’s reason to
- Liking or hearting someone’s post in the group chat
- Being the one to respond to a need when nobody else seems to be
- Sharing resources where you can
- Offering a hug to someone who looks like they need one
- Saying “good morning” to the person who seems down on their luck, and in doing so, letting them know someone sees them
Really none of these are grand gestures, and often they take seconds. It means keeping everyone in mind, and doing it openly, so nobody has to wonder where they stand with you. Loving out loud is leadership in its simplest form.
I’ve written before about how hard it can be to make friends in a new place, and about how limiting some friend groups can feel. Loving out loud is the antidote to much of that. It’s how you build the kind of circle where people feel safe and good and cared for, and it starts with you.
Living Out Loud
Living Out Loud is about giving our thoughts, feelings, and concerns somewhere to go.
That can mean writing them down. (I love journaling.) It can mean sharing our thoughts with someone we trust. What it doesn’t mean is holding hurt, sadness, or mistrust inside and letting it fester. We all know how that story ends. Things left to rot in the dark tend to leak out somewhere, usually at someone who didn’t deserve it.
It’s also saying plainly, “I want to do this,” then making a plan to do it, and sticking to the plan.
Living out loud isn’t only for the hard feelings. It’s for the good ones too. We can be excited out loud, and hopeful out loud. We can encourage ourselves and others out loud, the way a good parent encourages a child. In a way, it’s parenting ourselves.
For me that looks like:
- Having fun on purpose
- Taking myself on dates
- Doing something for the sheer joy of doing what I want
- Buying myself a little treat, or buying someone else a little treat
- Challenging myself to do hard things
- Exercising my body and my brain
- Learning a new language, a new culture
- Dressing my body in a way that reflects how I’m feeling, or how I want to feel
The Avocado Shirt
I own a t-shirt with a smiling cartoon avocado on it. Any time I want to feel a little happier, I wear that shirt, and the world interacts with me differently. I get more smiles when I do. So when I need more of that, I don the avocado, and it becomes this beacon of goodness when I need the boost.
Living out loud is not hiding how we feel, or how we’d like to feel. What happens when we live out loud is we feel more connected to everyone around us. (I wrote more about why joy matters so much for our health if your inner nerd wants some science.)
The Math
So when you Love Out Loud, you build a world full of people who feel seen and safe, and who will see and care for you in return. And when you Live Out Loud, you stop letting your own feelings, wants, and plans rot in the dark, and start moving toward a life you’ve built with intention. Put the two together, and you begin to realize an easier-feeling, expansive, purposeful Life of Leisure.
It doesn’t happen overnight, or on auto pilot, obviously. Sometimes I feel like I’m totally killing it and other times I’m sitting in my kitchen in the wrong t-shirt, wondering where it all went. The LOL is always a practice. So we can start (and re-start) where we are. We can scoot over for someone. Or write down the thing we’ve been holding in. We can wear the avocado.
LOL + LOL = LOL 😂
Peace and love to you, wherever this message finds you.
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