A guide to achieving the more joyful and interesting life that we know is within our grasp.
One of the things we all deeply crave is a more exciting life. We know that many things have to be routine, hard and a little boring. But we also sense that, if only we could find a way, our lives could be rendered more joyful, intense, thrilling, and beautiful.
This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes, or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology, teaching us how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations, and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary; we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others, and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance.
Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit and become open to the full intensity, beauty, and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life that should—and could—be ours.
The English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1896–1971) once remarked that what mattered less than whether someone was happy or not was whether they felt as if they were leading their own lives.
