Design Your Life

How fun it was this week to join MOCA+, as a guest on their Monday evening Collective Conscience Salon Series. Their focus:  ‘connecting by design’  and bringing people together who care about conscious connection. When we were prepping for the session I remarked that the tagline on my website Antheas.com is Design Your Life. It too is about conscious connection, in being purposeful about living in integrity with one’s purpose and passion – about life design really. 

We spoke about Magic in the Mundane: Making Life’s Ordinary Extraordinary and how prescient it was for the times. I wrote a series of 70 essays, about being present to life’s little things – the mundane, and finding magic in them that when strung together, connect the dots, to creating an amazing life.  

As I was reflecting on the evening I once again came back to a core tenet of mine that we are all responsible for our choices and in that word – a choice’ we create the alchemy for our lives. Choices are the means by which we design our life. It is through the power of choice, that we have the ability to design our life and to do it with intention.  To reflect, choose, then choose again. In each moment of every day we have a choice to make. Will we be happy or will we be sad? Will we be victimized or will we take charge?  Will we speak our truth or hold back?  Will we give or will we get?  What we do with every moment is how we tick tock our way through life. As time passes we get to decide and in that we are quite literally connecting by design and designing our lives. 

How ironic that in that one word, choose, a mundane word, we can find so much magic and make our lives extraordinary. In my book I speak of 70 simple ways to make life magical but it’s the word choice and in the power of choosing that there is so, so, so, much magic.  It means we get to decide what we will do, how we will do it, with whom we’ll do it and who we want to be in all that we do.  We get to decide.  Am I going to engage in political rhetoric? Am I doing to mind someone else’s business because they make a choice I don’t agree with?  Am I going to judge. Or will I choose to let go, enjoy happiness, and follow the mantra to each her own.  There is so much to decide in these fleeting lives we have.  As we shelter in place, we get to find and create magic each day. We get to choose.  And I choose this:

Slow down to speed up and enjoy the moment. Enjoy the simplicity life is showing us right now if we are blessed to be healthy with a roof over our heads and food on our table with loved ones in our midst.  It is Earth Day and how profound that on this day our skies are clear, our air is clean, our freeways are empty, and people are realizing that less is so much more.  Be kind to yourself today. And celebrate this planet and promise when this is all over you’ll find ways to take care of her, sustain her and connect with her. Connect by Design and in doing so design your life.  

Anthea Stratigos is a Silicon Valley-based CEO, wife, mother, grandmother, public speaker, writer and dedicated dog rescuer devoted to supporting others to live lives that work.  You can reach her at anthea@antheas.com.  Join her community, follow her on LinkedIn and Instagram, and share your magic in the mundane.