The Second Life

We have two lives.

The second one begins when we realize we have only one.

I saw this phrase or something similar on Instagram the other day, scrolling past it too fast to catch who said it, which felt right somehow. The best truths have a way of arriving anonymously, as they belong to everyone.

Photo by Geoffroy Hauwen on Unsplash

I have a love/hate relationship with social media. I see all the damage it can do to young people, especially. I see a lot of nonsense, too. I created an Instagram account for my wellness business, Soul via Sole, years ago, mostly from a dare from one of my teenage kids. I started it as a way to offer products people could use on their own and perhaps benefit from in their own lives, patterned after some of the tools I use in my private practice. I used to post every day, but I haven’t posted in months. It started to feel less genuine, and I didn’t know how to avoid feeling inadequate amid all the noise in the online space.

And it took a lot of time to create content, edit it, and consistently show up on camera.

So I started writing instead, which I could do privately, but strangely also feels very vulnerable. And writing, I discovered, is a different kind of courage that stretches me more than a 30-second reel or a talking video. It is asking more of me in some ways, which is ok because I crave the deep waters in life and in relationships.

It forces me to look inside myself and share what I discover and what I am learning on this nomadic journey, which, quite frankly, is revealing as much about myself as it is about learning about other cultures.

But you never know, I might get a wild hair and return to my social media and share more at some point.

But the truth is, it is hard being vulnerable.

Whether that is on screen or on paper…

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I think most of us at some point in our lives are terrified of being fully seen.

And yet, isn’t that the thing we want most? To be seen. Held. Valued. To feel safe enough to take up space in someone else’s awareness.

I’m not sure I truly felt that until much later in life. And if I’m honest, I still catch myself chasing it, performing expertise, projecting competence, hoping the version of me that looks like she has it together will be enough.

The philosopher Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I’ve been learning, slowly, to give that attention to myself. To let what I actually think and feel matter, rather than curating the version that seems most palatable…More “put together”. More curated.

I feel I am entering a messier, rawer, more authentic part of my one life.

And that feels a bit disorienting.

And really good.

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There’s a woman whose 100th birthday I read about recently on social media. Again, the pull to read and lose track of time… Her granddaughter asked her what wisdom she had for her younger self. Among the things she said: Have more courage. Trust yourself more. Get the passport. Buy the plane ticket. Make questionable life choices. Just go.

That list has been living in me.

Because to feel like you don’t quite know what you’re doing is the most common thing in the world, and yet we spend enormous energy pretending otherwise. We post the highlight reel. We crop out the doubt. We perform with certainty we don’t feel.

I think of Rilke’s instruction: “Live the questions now.” Not perform the answers. Do not rush to a resolution. But stay curious inside the uncertainty long enough for something real to emerge.

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I traveled for the first time at age 19, on an archaeological dig in Ireland for three weeks as part of my undergraduate education.

The choice was either that or a summer-long history requirement with the most feared professor in the department. Easy decision. I bargained with my parents: this could be my birthday and Christmas gift for the next five years, I pleaded. As it turned out, the lived experience of three weeks in Ireland cost the same as the tuition for sitting in a classroom in Georgia, so no hard sell was needed. Win-win.

What I didn’t know then was how that trip would change the architecture of who I was becoming. Other cultures don’t just expand your geography, they expand your interiority. You start to see that your way of doing things is a way, not the way. You become, as the Stoics would say, a citizen of the world, a kosmopolites, someone whose home is something larger than the place they were born. That summer changed me. It expanded me. It also made me less afraid to do scary things, like selling it all and becoming a nomad in my 50s.

My parents didn’t travel much. My father won a trip to Spain by selling World Book encyclopedias in his twenties, and he and my mom went to Europe for the only time in their lives. That was the extent of it. And yet now, watching my adult children visit us here in Madeira, I see something shifting in them. Their eyes are getting wider. The world is getting bigger. The possibilities are expanding. It is similar to what happened to me when I saw the world through a different lens for the first time as a young adult and now again as a, well, not so young adult.

This is something I hoped for when we sold everything and leapt into the unknown.

The expansion of life, not just for my husband and me, but for our family, too.

To be willing to jump into the messiness, the rawness of life that comes when we ask our fears to take a back seat in life.

And it got me thinking that when we come face to face with our own mortality, we also see that the price of lived experience is usually worth it. It is more often than not also win-win.

Or, as Mary Oliver asked so cleanly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

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My husband and I play a game sometimes. We ask: what would we tell our younger selves, the 20, 30, 40-year-old versions?

We always land on the same things.

Believe in yourself. Take the risks. Save early and consistently. Live below your means. Drive old cars. Learn new skills regularly. Speak kindly to yourself about yourself. Be humble. Stand up for what you believe in. Trust your ability to figure things out. There are no mistakes, only invitations to grow. Stay curious.

The Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius kept a private journal, not for publication, just for himself, where he returned again and again to the same questions: Am I living in alignment with my values? Am I wasting what’s been given to me? He called it Meditations. It was his way of staying honest with himself when the pull of comfort and status threatened to dull him.

I think most of us need something like that from time to time. Not a journal necessarily, but a practice of honest reckoning.

A “where am I in living my one life” moment of reflection.

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It’s easier to leave the cruise control on. To watch others live on social media. To zone out, to stay comfortable, to tell yourself you’ll make the change when things settle down.

But here’s what I’ve learned, and keep relearning: things don’t settle down. Life doesn’t pause while we work up the nerve. The moment is always now, imperfect and a little scary and completely alive. Messy and a bit raw, which I am learning to be good with.

So make the list. Write down the dreams. Look honestly at the pros and the cons of staying where you are versus taking the bet on yourself. Ask: Are the things holding me back temporary? Are the things pulling me forward worth it? What would the 90-year-old version say to the younger you?

It may not be that you have to move from one place to another, but a shift in perspective in some part of your life that feels stagnant may be in order.

The Stoics had a practice called memento mori, remember that you will die. Not as morbidity, but as clarity. As a way of asking: given the time I actually have, what matters?

We have two lives.

The second one begins the moment we stop waiting for permission to live the first one fully.

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If this resonated, I’d love to hear what the “second life” looks like for you. Drop a comment or reply to this email. And if you know someone who needs to read this, share it with them.