The other morning, as I was scrolling through my email inbox before breakfast, I noticed an email from a self-help guru whose subscription list I had signed up for. In this particular email, what was being offered were 14 mindset shifts which, it was suggested, will “change your life.”

I could easily think a lot more about this thing called a “mindset shift,” but, for some reason, on this particular morning, it was the "change your life" phrase I started churning over in my mind. Change my life, huh? Hmmm.

What does it mean to say something changes your life? I had no idea that email was going to pop up in my inbox that morning so I couldn’t possibly have had any clue that I would start thinking and writing about my life changing. So did that email “change my life”?

What is a life and when does it not change? Can we ever keep our lives the same? What would a non-changing life be?

There seems to be an unspoken idea here that this thing we call a “life” has a certain path or direction stretching way out into the future. Sometimes, so the story goes, things can happen to knock you off your path or spin you off in a new, different direction.

But can we have other stories? What if life is a series of “right nows”? Right now, I’m typing on my keyboard and,........

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