To live a good life is to decide to stop living unconsciously and to make a decision that you are going to wake up to all that is beautiful and holy and that still works.
And to remember that if you want to have loving feelings, you need to do loving things.
And you just keep doing these actions that are about awareness and that are about love and that somehow are helped along by learning to, to breathe, you know, left foot, right foot, left foot, breathe.
And when we breathe, we're sort of spritzed into awareness.
And when we breathe, we're so deeply nourished and it creates an umbilical cord between the beauty of life, the awareness of life, and the beauty of the people who, against all odds, just love us more and more with every passing year.
A good life means that you get outside every day, that you somehow get outside and you look up, you look at the stars, you look at the moon, you look at the sun, you look at the sun rising.
Those are the things that, to me, constitute the good life.
So every time I talk with Ann LaMotte, I just feel like I've been embraced by kindness and humility, love and a whole lot of laughter.
Anne is a multi time New York Times bestselling author whose latest book, Somehow Thoughts on Love, offers profound yet practical wisdom that can really help transform our lives.
In our conversation, she shares insights from her seven decades of living, loving and learning as she turns 70 and releases her 20th book, which is rich with stories and humor and reverence and love and insights all told in a way that only Anne can do.
Despite her success.
She describes herself as kind of an unlikely elder who has accumulated a lifetime's worth of insights through her experiences and somehow and compiles her most important learnings on love and leaves them as a bit of a parting gift to her son and grandson.
She explores the power of compassion, community and our inner lives to anchor us through life's turbulence.
And Ann's wisdom is really humble yet illuminating, blending wit and candor that speaks to the shared human experience.
And she also shares a deeply moving story about her dad in his final months and how he became her makeshift first reader and editor for a book that would eventually tell her side of their shared story very early in her career.
So excited to share this conversation with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields and this is good life project.
It's funny, I was catching up a little bit and when you, Neil, got married that you're sort of like your song.
Leaving the Grove was Van Morrison's into the mystic and I was literally just talking to a friend, and we were describing to each other, what's the feeling of a song that you would love to be the feeling of your life.
And that's the song that came to mind.