I found these inspiring words by The Artist’s Way author, Julia Cameron recently. Try substituting the word “life” for “art.”
It is all too easy to think of art as something we aspire to, an ideal by which to measure our efforts and find them falling woefully short.
Well, that is one way to think of art, and God knows we have bludgeoned ourselves with it pretty thoroughly. Our concepts of “great art” and “great artists” are often less something we aspire to than something we use to denigrate our own effort. We might want to try thinking about art a little differently.
Art is less about what we could be, and more about what we are, than we normally acknowledge. When we are fixated on getting better, we miss what it is we already are. And this is dangerous, because we, as we are, are the origin of our art. We are what makes our art original. If we are always striving to be something more and something different, we dilute the power of what it is we actually are. Doing that, we dilute our art.
Diary of a Pilgrim 