You Can Know So Much — And Still Not Live By It

On the misunderstanding that we first have to understand or achieve everything before we can truly live our lives.

For years, my understanding of the deeper connections of life, of ease, of flow, wasn’t gone.

It simply wasn’t accessible to me anymore. And I most certainly was not living it.

From the outside, my life still looked good. Maybe even enviable.

But what has come to matter most to me is not how life looks.

It is how it feels. How I experience it.

This can be difficult to explain to people who still believe that the right circumstances will fix how we feel inside.

But you can have a million in your account and still feel just as unsafe around money as someone with one hundred euros.

You can be heartbroken on a beach in Bali just as intensely as in a one-room flat in Baden-Württemberg.

Of course, we assume the millions are better. Of course, Bali sounds preferable.

And yes, circumstances can make a difference.

But are they the difference?

That question has stayed with me for years.

I often think back to a moment in 2018.

I was having dinner at the home of a woman who, by most standards, had everything:

an important role, an impressive career, a beautiful house in San Francisco, a family, social status, and financial success.

And at one point, I heard her say to a friend:

“Anna is living the kind of life we should all be living.”

I still remember how confusing that felt to me. In my eyes, she was the successful one. She was the one with the house, the career, the visible stability.

And yet what she saw in me was something entirely different:

Aliveness. Freedom. Being guided by life instead of constantly managing it.

At the time, I was travelling the world. I was making every decision intuitively and moved where life pulled me. My life wasn’t necessarily structured, and I was not successful in a conventional way.

But I was deeply in touch with something real.

I loved it, and despite it not always being easy, I never wanted to trade it for anything else.

A few years later — and one pandemic after that — that same woman and I had something in common:

Neither of us was happy with the life we were living.

She wanted to be on holiday with her family, who had gone without her because of her job.

She wanted a life that felt more musical, more human, less shaped by pressure and status.

And I, despite having once known something else so intimately, no longer felt free either.

Not inwardly.

That is what I keep coming back to:

Knowing is not the same as living.

I knew there was another way to be.

I had even experienced it before.

And still, for years, I could not access it.

What changed things for me was not learning more.

It was the willingness to experience again.

To be here. To stay. To let myself actually meet what was present.

Not later.

Not once I had figured everything out.

Not when the outside had finally calmed down.

Now.

Because life does not happen later.

It happens now.

And maybe that is the misunderstanding many of us live inside of:

If we just understand more, improve more, and achieve more, then life will begin.

But the truth, as I experience it now, is different.

Life is already happening.

The only question is whether we are really here for it.

So maybe the more honest question is:

Are you here for it?

Truly here for it, for all that life brings?