Appreciating your life—no matter the hand you’ve been dealt—is the cheat code to happiness. ☀️

But in our world of perpetual dissatisfaction, it’s hard.

It’s so easy to always be looking ahead to the next thing.

To always feel like you’re never enough, that it’s never enough, and that you’ll never truly be happy until you’ve achieved X Y and Z.

Until you finally have that boyfriend.

Until you finally get married.

Until you finally get pregnant, have kids, and have that perfect house with the white picket fence.

That life won’t really start for you until you land your dream job or get a promotion.

So often we’re in this mindset of looking ahead, and planning for what’s ahead, that we completely miss what’s already right in front of us.

Today, we’ll unpack one of my favorite Stoic principles, amor fati.

To love one’s fate.

To embrace it, lean into, and flow with it, ~regardless~ of the circumstances of one’s life.

This isn’t to say we don’t have a right to feel disappointment or sadness when things don’t go as we’d hoped—

But moreso a groundbreaking acceptance that life WILL unfold how it wants, whether we like it or not.

And we can either choose to fight it, and spend all of our precious time and energy trying to control the uncontrollable, OR we can live out our days—our finite time on this earth—with the intention of instead controlling OURSELVES, OUR perceptions, OUR beliefs, OUR decisions and actions, to choose to appreciate what’s here.

To be truly here, and truly present, and embrace ALL of life’s happenings as critical experiences to shaping us into wiser, stronger, more resilient creatures.

Grab your favorite bevvy, and let’s get into it.

The Freedom of Having No Resentments

This was a thread I wrote after it hit me suddenly, one day, that I could die in that moment totally and utterly content.

I honestly felt that I had reached a point where death didn’t scare me anymore—not in a morbid way—but more like, I felt I had reached a point where I wasn’t keeping score anymore.

I wasn’t keeping tabs on anyone, or the hurt they had done me. And likewise, I’d done my inner work and cleared my side of the street for anyone I had harmed.

I realized I had absolutely no hard feelings, resentments, or guilt towards myself or anyone else. And that no matter what’s transpired in my life so far, and despite me not yet being where I want to be—

I could honestly and earnestly say that I was happy.

Content and at peace with it all.

Every chapter of my life, every word and every occurrence that was desired and undesired, every pivot and unexpected turn. I was at peace with every bit of it, and moreso, I realized I appreciated it all.

I’d come to a radical point of acceptance and gratefulness that I wouldn’t be me—the Megan writing this now—had those things not happened to me, and had I not met the people I’d met and had the experiences that I’d had.

It was truly a moving epiphany and as I wrote the thread, I had an almost out-of-body experience. I was the observer, watching my life, replaying every moment at high-speed, similar to how they say life flashes before one’s eyes right before they’re about to die.

I recalled every tough experience, every heartbreak.

I thought about people who came crashing into my life, becoming the most important and pivotal parts of me, and then grieving their absence as they suddenly crashed back out.

Major characters, minor characters, floating in and out of the fabric that was the epic unfolding of my life.

I watched it all, meditated on every moment, realizing with sudden clarity that it was all meant to happen, exactly in this order.

There was no such thing as regret anymore, for to regret what had happened would be to unravel and undo what was to be an essential part of my making—my arrival at THIS point, this particular Megan, with her particular set of beliefs and ways of seeing the world.

I couldn’t possibly undo what had already taken place, nor did I have any desire to. And becoming aware of this lack of desire was when I realized I had ascended to another level.

Is this what freedom felt like? Complete and radical acceptance of the cards I’d been dealt?

I was baffled at how at peace I was with it all. That even the worst of my moments—losing a baby, discovering an affair, coming to terms that I was to be, a single mom after all—I knew, with 100% certainty, that it was all meant to be this way. That it was likely orchestrated, brewing in the background, long before I was even aware of it.

In that moment, I experienced the utter, complete freedom of having no resentments whatsoever. For completely, radically accepting the whole of my life—my past, my present, and even the future yet to come.

I loved it all. Truly, truly loved and appreciated every damn second of it.

Wikipedia defines amor fati as,

Similarly, the Daily Stoic defines it as,

This is of course not to say that we should be practicing toxic positivity—pretending that things don’t affect us, and acting indifferent towards everything in life. This is a huge misconception of Stoicism.

Rather, amor fati is to accept that life will flow and ebb as it wishes, with and without our consent. And that our PERCEPTION of this fact doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing.

Robert Pantano puts it perfectly, reminding us that “we exist in a reality that does not care about our opinion of it. We cannot ask it nicely to remove the chaos, suffering, hardship, and uncertainty, nor can we will ourselves onto it with force in order to do so.”

So this leaves us with only two options.

To co-exist and embrace and accept such a reality, choosing to make the most of it and consciously find the beauty and lessons within it, or—

To live in a state of denial and therefore self-imposed hardship and suffering.

And unfortunately, many choose the latter. They live their lives scrambling, frantically trying to orchestrate and rearrange external circumstances to their liking until they can finally reach that elusive landmark of “happiness”. “Freedom”. Or “success.”

They spend their whole lives trying to play God, failing to realize that in the process, they’ve completely MISSED their whole lives. They were never there for it. They were never present or appreciative for any of it.

And many of us go to our graves living our lives in this very way.