Are you living life to the fullest?
Whenever I hear the phrase “Live life to the fullest ”or“ I’m living life to the fullest,” for some reason, it always reminds me of Jack Nicholson’s line in As Good As It Gets. As his character Melvin Udall is walking out of his psychiatrists office, he looks at the patients in the waiting room and exclaims, “What if this is as good as it gets?” In the same move, Nicholson’s character also delivers another classic line to Helen Hunt when he says to her, “You make me want to be a better man.” Udall learns to live life to the fullest.
These two lines about living life to the fullest represent the core distinction created in the book, A Life Worth Living. Is this all there is? Is this as good as it gets? Are we destined to only survive in the world we created? And if we are stuck with the world we’ve created, will we survive at all? Nicholson’s character Udall shows us that no, we’re not stuck, we can make it better, we can invent a life that calls us to be better. It’s easy for us to identify the things in our lives that will make us better when they show up in our lives as Helen Hunt’s character did for Udall. There it is (or in Udall’s case, there she is), right in front of your eyes. You’ve found something in the world to pull you forth to become a better human being, to live life to the fullest.
The distinction we miss is that Helen Hunt’s character was not the cause of Udall’s transformation, Udall was. He declared, “You make me want to be a better man.” He said it. She didn’t. He did. He found it in her and thus he found it in himself. Udall’s declaration that this might be as good as it gets is also true though. It is as good as it gets, but that’s not so bad when you consider that the “it” he’s talking about – life – includes with it the capacity for human beings to do as he did declare a powerful future and then live into it.
We all deserve the possibility of living life to the fullest especially when it’s really so simple to begin. You don’t need to wait for the right woman (or man) to walk into your life to begin to live life to the fullest. All you need to do is declare. Declare the future you want to live into just as Nicholson’s Udall did. Just because Udall attached those words to something outside himself, doesn’t make him any less the cause of his own future. It’s in this way that this book will teach you to live life to the fullest.
Are you living life to the fullest? Learn to live life to the fullest. Get your copy of A Life Worth Living today!