Time to read: 45 seconds
Here's the part nobody puts on a poster: living well doesn't mean your circumstances match your values. Often they don't.
You value connection, but you're isolated. You value health, but your body won't cooperate. You value stability, but everything feels uncertain. This is where a lot of people quietly give up and decide that living well is only available to people with easier lives, or money, or beauty.
I think this is exactly where "well-used" gets tested.
Integrity in complexity, as I put it a few weeks back, doesn't mean the complexity goes away. It means you keep choosing your values inside it, however imperfectly, instead of waiting for circumstances to improve before you start living the way you actually want.
Some of the most well-used lives I've seen belong to people whose circumstances were challenging. They just refused to let that be the end of the story. They made one small choice after another until they looked back and realized they created their life.
This tenacity is available to everyone.