It’s more than breathing.
More than a pulse.
There’s a difference between being alive and actually living.
In his book, Purple Crayons: The Art of Drawing a Life, author Ross Ellenhorn calls it livingness.
Livingness is both our greatest challenge and triumph. It is an uncompromising act of defiance where we dare to be original.
It’s a refusal to comply with the pressures to conform.
It’s allowing our own thoughts, ideas, and personal styles to make contact with the world, despite the prospects of ridicule and ostracism.
It’s admitting to ourselves that uniformity — merely treading through life on the heels of robotic carbon copies — is the source of our emptiness and the death of imagination, spontaneity, and originality.
Livingness is being an individual when the collective refuses to set you free.
It’s being one of one.
It’s improv. Ad lib. Making it up as we go along.
It’s you facing the world, purple crayon in your trembling hand, willing to draw a life that makes you feel alive.
Writes Ellenhorn, “Nothing will happen for you that has any sense of life to it unless you take the risk to draw.”
On today’s Motivation Monday episode, Les Brown encourages you to take the risk, to come alive, and to keep holding on when the inevitable setbacks and disappointments of embracing your livingness emerge.
Because livingness is something worth fighting for.
Source: The Courage to Live Your Dreams
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