Fulfilment Is Boring
Launching The Cabin has shown me the problem with fulfilment. Well, not fulfilment itself, but talking about it. I have found it hard to talk about fulfilment because it is so “is that it?”.
Maybe you find this. The desire for fulfilment to be something more than just what you want. The expectation that it is this magical thing glinting on a hill top, and then the disappointment when you find that it's just… doing more of what you want to be doing. We want a quest and a struggle and a transformative moment and not like, just going for a walk every day. How boring is that?
Fulfilment is boring as hell. It's all habits and remembering and recovering your self and making choices and reading a book and setting screen time limits. It is cups of tea and going through the calendar and taking a very deep breath and forcing yourself to shut the laptop when you know it's time. There's not one single banner or one swanny whistle of a fanfare - you just look around one day and think “oh, this is everything I wanted”.
This does not make for an electric sales page: “I can promise this is not the shiny adventure you want it to be”, “I guarantee you will be disappointed by how simple it all is”. Because it is simple. We can theorise and dress it up all we want but at the end of the day if you want to change your life you have to change your life. You have to make different choices and follow through on them. That's literally it.
And that sounds boring because it sounds like work, but it also sounds boring because it sounds too easy. "Well if all I have to do is decide to do what I want, I can do that anytime I like." And yet… here we are, still not doing it.
We do have one loophole out of the boredom though, and it's in exactly this point - we decide. If we're deciding to make a change and follow through on it, we can decide how we make that change. We can decide it's going to be boring or… we can decide it's going to be something else. We can decide we're going to approach it as an indulgence, as an experiment, as self-care, as fun, as something magic.
This was why I made The Cabin really, to be a container for this journey that was just so nice, that made it special - as well as being a guide along the way. Because if you're not in the habit of deciding, then it can be easy to forget you're approaching this as lovely, and then it becomes boring again, and then it's easy to let it slide and then it… never happens.
And although fulfilment can be boring - at least compared to what we want it to be - it is also what makes life worth living.
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