If you had to describe your ideal life, what would it look like?

I find the title of John Lennon’s song comforting.  Not because I am thinking necessarily of his sentiments.  More my own interpretation and I find the title fits the good days and the bad.  Days from which I glean some conception of an ideal life. 

There are mornings the cat has taken my feet hostage at the bottom of the bed.  My husband Ronnie’s arm is firm around my middle and it feels like this will always be.  Warm, protective, a day of possibilities and hope glisten waiting to unravel.  At those moments I could joyously exclaim “nobody told me there would be days like this”. 

Moreover there were dark days I couldn’t even tell myself that there would be days (of happiness) like these. 

My ideal life entails the absence of past unpleasantness as much as the presence of things beautiful and wholesome.  It’s the balance that flavours experience and makes it feel ideal.

I guess the ideal life for me will be full of days where I don’t think about me all day.  MY plans. MY fears. MY selfish drawing on  the water of never enough.  Instead of drinking the living water of my Christian faith.  Which enables me to live a day at a time, trust in God and cope with life’s inevitabilities.

Oh and Yes financial security is part of my view of an ideal life.  Money does not make you happy but it is dibilatating robbing Peter to pay Paul.  Or having a job that pays you unfairly.

The sad and increasing incidence of suicide often tells us ‘ideal lives’ are not all what they seemed.   Probably best to hope for inner contentment than ideal life circumstances. We are all so subject to the vicissitudes of life events.

The loving surrender St John Henry Newman describes in his beautiful poem is truly the ideal life:

Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom,
    lead thou me on;
the night is dark, and I am far from home;
    lead thou me on.
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
the distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou
    shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now
    lead thou me on.
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears,
pride ruled my will: remember not past years.

So long thy power hath blest me, sure it still
    will lead me on,
o’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
    the night is gone,
and with the morn those angel faces smile,
which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.

St John Henry Newman