How to Live Your Dream Life Now: The Enough Audit
Previously, I shared about my trip to Boothbay Harbor and how I’d been dismissing my regular life as “not enough” — that someday my dream life would come, eventually. If it wasn’t for a children’s book from the 80s, I might still be waiting for someday.
You can read that here ➡️ What Miss Rumphius Taught Us About Living The Dream Life (Part 1)
How to Stop Chasing Your Dream Life and Start Seeing It
In Part One, I left you with this question: So how do I — how do we — live like Miss Rumphius? How do we make our corner of the world a little bit more beautiful?
If you find this kind of question makes you want to slither to the floor in a heap because it feels too consuming, too much, too open, then you’re in good company. Deep breath, friend.
Because here’s what I keep coming back to: Miss Rumphius had a life first.
She worked in a library far from the sea and salt air. She traveled to tropical islands and mountain ranges and deserts. She made friends and lived a full and glorious life. Until she hurt her back and knew it was time for the next dream, a cottage by the sea.
Barbara Cooney captures that transition in six words: and it was, and she did.
Miss Rumphius never rushed. She moved through life following her desires. When she was ready for the next thing, she went. Each dream arrived in its own time. She let each moment be enough. It wasn’t until her hair was streaked white that she scattered her lupine seeds. And yet she never seemed to be waiting.
So before we talk about scattering seeds — before we talk about making the world more beautiful — I want to ask you the same thing Miss Rumphius had to do first.
Stand in your ordinary life and look around. We need to see what is there. Not what’s missing, but what’s already there. What parts of your current life are actually the dream life you crave? Because my fellow burnout overachiever, who’s been climbing and climbing, pushing your goals out into the horizon…. I bet if you paused and looked, you would find moments of your dream life you are living right now.
I realized I had bought into a promise of a dream life that was always out of reach. It wasn’t until I stopped and looked around that I was living moments of my dream life that I had been dismissing because they weren’t exactly as I envisioned in my journal or Pinterest vision board; they weren’t “enough.”
What the Enough Audit Is and How It Works
It was somewhere between returning from Maine and the burnout and the bone-deep tiredness that I stopped and did something simple. Stupidly simple, really.
I wrote out my dream life. Then I wrote out my ordinary day-to-day life. And I looked for where they aligned.
Seeing that side-by-side list, it became clear I was caught in a perpetual loop of chasing. But that isn’t a personal failing. We’ve been shaped by hustle culture, by hyper consumerism, by every “New Year New You,” by every Instagram ad and TikTok scroll. We are always in a state of chasing. Always one rung away. Always one optimization away from enough. The ladder isn’t built for us to ever arrive. And that’s by design.
But the Enough Audit shows you where you’ve been saying this isn’t enough. Where you’ve been climbing and chasing without ever looking down at what you’ve already built.
“what if your dream life is already happening, and you just haven’t named it yet?”
I want a vegetable garden in my backyard in my dream life. Well, I currently have three small garden beds in my parents’ backyard. That is enough! I’ll keep tending and growing, but right now this is my dream life.
I want to create content that helps others realize they’re living their dream life right now. I may not have 100,000 followers or six-figure months, but I am living my dream life right now. I am helping you realize yours.
So ask yourself: What is enough right now? Look at the seeds you’re already planting and ask what are you currently doing that aligns with your dreams?
You’ll seldom arrive at your dream life and feel like you’ve made it, that life is complete. We are always evolving. But the Enough Audit helps you see that you are already living parts of your dream life. The rest will come in their own time.
What would you see if you stopped looking at the bare soil and looked at what’s already growing?
The Difference Between Joy and Happiness in Your Dream Life
Here’s where Miss Rumphius gets interesting. Her first two dreams were for herself. The travel. The cottage. The third dream — making the world more beautiful — that one was for everyone else. And yet it brought her more joy than anything that came before it.
Joy deepens when it stops being only about you.
When I did my Enough Audit, I noticed that what was missing wasn’t more dream-life moments; it was joy.
I used to think I had to resolve my grief and pain before I could feel joy. That I had to get through enough — enough healing, enough stability, enough of the hard stuff — before joy was available to me.
Then Trump took office and ICE started tearing families apart. I lost my job. My mom was fighting cancer. And on a trip celebrating my brother’s 40th, swimming Hol Chan with sharks, I learned my soul dog had cancer too.
And there I was swimming with sharks. Fully alive. Completely heartbroken. Both at once.
Poet Ross Gay asks: What if joy is not separate from pain? What if joy and sorrow are fundamentally tangled up with one another? What if joy is not only entangled with pain, or suffering, or sorrow, but is also what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?
And that’s where the seeds come in. The third dream was never just about Miss Rumphius feeling good. It was about what she put back into the world. That’s the part I’d been missing.
The Enough Audit helps you see that yes, you are living moments of your dream life, but it snaps you into clarity because living your dream life isn’t just about you. It’s about how we take care of others.
My lupine seeds are this: helping you see that you are already living moments of your dream life, so you can step off the hamster wheel and start measuring your life in joy, not productivity.
That’s what I’m here to scatter. And just like Miss Rumphius, who scattered her seeds wherever she went. I, too believe we need to do the same. Because if one person reads this and feels more seen, that’s the world becoming more beautiful.
Joy emerges when we care for others. Joy emerged as I cared for my mom. Joy emerged when my writing shifted to helping others, not just myself. Joy came when I turned my focus from inward to outward. Remember, Miss Rumphius’ back didn’t hurt her anymore once she knew how to bring joy to others.
So how are you going to make this world more beautiful?
How to Find Your Lupine Seeds and Make the World More Beautiful
At the end of Miss Rumphius, she sits with her great-niece and tells her: You must do something to make the world more beautiful.
And the little girl says: But I do not know yet what that can be.
I can’t tell you what your lupine seeds are. Neither could Miss Rumphius tell her great niece. That’s the whole point. You don’t find your seeds by optimizing for them or vision-boarding for them.
You find them by living. By tending your garden. By noticing what makes you come alive and then putting it outside the gate where the wind can carry it.
If you don’t know yet what that can be.
That is all right.
You will find it.
