Hello and welcome to What is a Good Life? A project exploring big questions around what really matters to people. Over the last 5 years, I have interviewed over 300 people around this question.
This week, I am reflecting on my conversation with Laura Costello. Laura is Chief Communications Officer at Hometree, a nature restoration charity, and also led the Good Life 2030 Ireland project which invited people across the country to imagine a brighter future. We explore how people responded when asked to consider what makes a good life and what Laura has learned from the project.
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Take care, Mark
1. My Weekly Reflection
During Laura’s research for the Good Life 2030 Project she interviewed a man who after reflecting on the conversation decided to sell his house and move.
It’s incredible how we can affect each other in certain encounters.
It reminded me of a moment a former guest of the podcast shared about her husband. He was in his late teens and working at a gas station in the US. He was talking with a customer and the customer remarked how smart the young man was. He suggested he should consider going to college. Nobody from his family had gone to college before. Several decades later her husband is a professor and considers that moment to be pivotal. He never saw the man again.
It’s strange, the mixture of things that makes something stick or not.
I once suspected I had left the keys in the door, inside our apartment, as I was closing it and leaving. I warned my wife ahead of time that this might be the case. Even though it turned out not to be true, I now nearly always slide my hand over the lock on the inside of the door as I close it.
As I do this I often laugh to myself wishing my power to adapt and change a behaviour so rapidly and consistently was used for something more useful or where my behaviours have greater consequence.
I sometimes get messages from listeners to the podcast that say a specific episode led them to something new or clarified a new direction. There are obviously many episodes that don’t have that effect on them.
I am sure there are many of you reading this who despite therapy, coaching, retreats, and twenty self-help books on a topic, still find something simply hasn’t shifted.
I don’t know what the formula is for it all but I have seen enough to know that any particular moment or interaction can change us or our situation, whether marginally or significantly. We mostly never know ahead of time when it will be.
It may be something small that slowly accumulates over time that we even forget the source of it. It might be a thunderbolt and make for a great story one day.
A moment I often reflect on from these interviews is of a man in prison mentoring some of his fellow inmates on addiction recovery. He involuntarily sighed and said aloud that he didn’t know what his purpose in life was. Only for a young man, with little interest in recovery in the group, to suggest the very thing he was doing in that moment was it.
He talked about being in his cell later that day and that observation taking root within him.
The beauty for me as someone who gets to interview so many people around this question is that hope rarely seems to leave me. It is a gradual accumulation from consistently hearing people reflect on their lives.
Yes, tragedy or suffering may also be around the corner for me – there are so many things out of my control. But I have heard so many moments where something unexpected happens – something that people simply did not see coming – that they are eternally grateful for.
As Laura points out in this week’s conversation, it may just depend on whether we are paying our lives enough attention to recognise them when they arrive. Just as we can’t ever fully know the effect we can have on each other, we might also pay close attention to our actions in that regard too.
2. This Week’s Questions
Has a fleeting moment with a stranger ever meaningfully altered your life?
Have you ever been surprised by how you have influenced somebody else’s life?
3. Weekly Clip From The Podcast
4. Full Episode - Your One Wild & Precious Life with Laura Costello - What is a Good Life? #188
Listen to or watch the full conversation with Laura Costello 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.