What is a Good Life? #174
Being In The Pulse Of Life with Laura Beckingham
Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring the big questions around how we live and what actually matters.
This week, I'm reflecting on my conversation with Laura Beckingham — a modern mystic for turbulent times. It's a conversation that remains as grounded in the bread and butter of life as it ascends into the spiritual. Family Constellations, ancestral wisdom, the right size in relationships, grief and death, and the energy of birth. It will leave you with plenty to sit with.
If this project resonates with you, thank you for being here – and if you’d like to support it, consider a paid subscription, sharing, or subscribing.
Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
I have noticed this a few times while out walking my dog and my daughter is on her push bike.
In one moment, I feel totally content, at ease with Ava cruising along the street, while I throw Alma a treat for her to raise up on her hind legs and pluck it from the sky.
And then in a matter of seconds, I can be disturbed by the slightest thing, Alma taking too long for my liking when inspecting the pee of another dog.
For a while I discounted the peace and contentment I experienced as somehow disproven by the existence of impatience and some gruffness with my dog a moment later.
Even suspicious of the spaciousness I could experience again moments later.
However, more and more, I am not seeking to tie them together in a story.
If you want to say you had a shit day, what do you do with the moment your belly ached from laughter with a friend. Does that get lost or banished in the headline of shit day?
Last week, I was in Athens at a forum that one of my best mates was also attending. At one point we took a break from the crowds and busyness of the forum and found a bar and a table on a somewhat quiet street.
As it goes with this friend, jovial nonsense is interspersed with real depth.
And so we talked about fatherhood for a time and the respective aches we could feel the more we were having to let go of toddlers meeting the world. Ideas around protecting and preparing them swirled. Letting go again too.
Listening to us reflect on the moments we don't quite meet the mark as parents, a thought occurred.
In recent years, more generally, our ideas of parenting have got hung up on whether love given to someone is conditional or unconditional. To me it has always struck me as an intense judgement of however a parent may have raised a child.
I sense it more these days, even before I became a father, as something that really impedes us seeing things more clearly.
A moment where conditional love was present doesn’t somehow cancel out or erase the series of moments where it clearly felt unconditional.
At one point in the interview, Laura shared something about a good friend of her’s passing that really spoke to an element of what I am pointing at:
“She’s more alive than ever, interestingly to me, now that she’s passed over than she was certainly in her last few weeks. When we can stop separating these things or setting them up as opposition or as binary or paradoxes and start realising that they’re actually all just parallel threads.”
She later went on to say:
“Everything settles when we acknowledge what is, I think.”
Paying less attention to the story and more to the moments.
2. This Week’s Questions
Where are you paying more attention to the story and less to living the moments?
What brings you into contact with the living pulse of life?
Thanks for reading What is a Good Life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Being In The Pulse Of Life with Laura Beckingham - What is a Good Life? #174
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Laura Beckingham below.
For Apple podcast click here.
About Me
I am a writer, facilitator, and podcast host, based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed over 300 people. I’m not looking to prescribe universal answers, more that the guests’ lines of inquiry, musings, experiences, and curiosities spark your own inquiry into what the question means to you. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience and more meaningful conversations.