Are you all in when it comes to living your life to the full? Norah Casey draws from personal experience in embracing the joy and vitality of life – seize it, shape it and drive it, only you can design your own future.

In life, you can choose to stand still, or you can choose to keep moving. When I was hit by adversity so large it threatened to engulf me, this was my only way out – it was the life raft I clung to in those desperate times. I chose life. And that means something. It is a choice that spawns another hundred choices – if you choose life, you choose movement and engagement and feeling and thinking and loving and hurting and learning and failing and succeeding.

That’s the key to vital living, choose it all. What’s vital living you may well ask? To me, this is a state of mind and being where you feel fully alive because you are learning, growing as a person, enjoying your family and friendships and planning for more achievements in the years to come. It’s a fully engaged, active and directed way of living your life, which is tailormade by you to make yourself happy. This is what I feel I’ve achieved over the last decade, and I want to encourage others to do the same.

EYES WIDE OPEN

What we need to ask now, after all that soul-searching over the past two years, is how can I be the best version of myself?

How do I live vitally? Vital living is an engaged way of living. I understand the value of taking time out of our busy lives for reflection and contemplation. We all need time to think and quiet our minds from the whirlwind of thoughts and emotions that we experience. But I see that as an occasional respite rather than as a way of living our lives. Being vital means you are all in and here’s why that is much more natural to us. Humans – of all of the species on earth – have the higher abilities of reflection and anticipation, and we have this hindsight and foresight for a reason. Our genetic development is based on our powers to learn from past experiences, to process events and emotions and predict what that might mean for us in the future. Vital living is not about stasis, dawdling in the slow lane while life races by. Instead, I love the idea of being vital or zoetic, which basically means being alive, being possessed of life and energy.

Being zoetic is about living with your eyes wide open – always looking to the future and the potential it holds.

THE BOSS OF YOU

Living a life of “acceptance” is diametrically opposed to what I believe and strive for. I can see the benefits of ridding your mind of the clutter every now and again and do it regularly. But life is meant to be lived full on. Seize it, shape it and drive it. You’re the boss of you, and serenity is not the aim. Don’t settle for being a bystander; get in the game and do your best.

My own view of life and the beauty of being vital is embedded in how we came to be who we are. Indulge me in a brief trip back in time to our evolution and what makes us uniquely human.

In evolutionary terms, most of our history (90 per cent) has been spent as hunter gatherers – until 12,000 years ago when agriculture took over and we farmed food and vegetables. That hunter gatherer period was our most successful adaptation as humans from c. 1.8 million years ago as Homo erectus, and c. 0.2 million years ago as Homo sapiens. Our success as a species owes much to the ability of our predecessors to engage in an early form of reinforcement learning – where future decisions are based on past experiences. Hunter-gatherers didn’t stay in the moment, they constantly learned, appraised and moved forward.

There are two opposing views of humans as a species: Charles Darwin believed we have inherently the same cognitive abilities as other animals, but we have developed them to a greater extent through evolution; other scientists believe that humans are distinct from other species by virtue of their intellect and abilities.

WHAT MAKES US HUMAN

There are many traits that have been cited as uniquely human – some stand up to scrutiny better than others. Human’s uniquely enjoy humour, can appreciate beauty, and we have the ability to understand our own mortality as distinct from an animal’s survival instinct. We have complex communication skills - verbal through language, and in writing through sophisticated symbols. We have an appreciation for beauty and culture. We have morality - a sense of right and wrong – and the ability to abide by personal values or spiritual beliefs. We also understand time and the connectedness of the past to the present and to the future. We have foresight.

We become wise by learning through experience. We also have the capacity to love and form deep emotional bonds.

While other animals, and especially our closest relations in the animal world, the great apes, have the foundation blocks for some of these traits, our understanding of time and the connectedness past, present and future sets us apart, according to one of the world’s leading experts in this field. Thomas Suddendorf is professor of psychology at the University of Queensland, a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the author of The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us From Other Animals. After extensive research over twenty years on human evolution, apes and children, in this seminal work Suddendorf reviews and tests the abilities regularly cited as uniquely human. Of all of these, he narrows the list down to just two traits that makes our minds distinct from other species.

SET A SAT-NAV

First, our ability to review future scenarios and determine how we wish to reach them. Nowhere in the animal world do we find evidence of goalsetting or anticipating future scenarios.

Our ‘free will’ is based on our ability to see possible future outcomes, weigh up the pros and cons of each and decide which way to go. And although we know to our core that this is an inexact science, it does give us the guide ropes to achieve our goals.

Secondly, our need to link our minds together. In order to ensure that we make the best possible decisions based on the best possible information, we connect with other humans. According to Professor Suddendorf, these traits make us unique:

‘These two attributes appear to have been essential to our ancestors’ transforming common animal traits into distinctly human ones -- communication into open-ended language, memory into strategic planning and social traditions into cumulative culture.’

All this means that we are genetically designed to think ahead, to plan for the future and to develop goals that we aspire to achieve. So set a ‘sat-nav’ for your life, it could just be a short term goal or a big life plan.

GOOD TO TALK

Unfortunately, there are no quick fixes that allow our minds to bypass complex and intrinsically human challenges. The mind needs time. But we are also, as humans, connected to one another – we are driven to communicate and learn from one another.

Talking things through with friends and loved ones is how we develop our relationships.

Being angry and vulnerable and hurt and anxious – they are all part of our humanity and we form deeper emotional attachments with people by having an honest relationship based on truth and reality.

ALWAYS LEARNING

Back, then, to my initial argument, which is that living in a vital way, being zoetic, is the best way to conduct a life. I firmly believe that, having tried other alternatives. The key to making this a successful strategy for living is our fundamental urge to link our minds together, to look to one another for useful information. We ask questions and give advice. We bond through sharing experiences. We can use our imagination to entertain the perspectives of others as well as to consider entirely fictional scenarios. This allows us to take advantage of others’ experiences, reflections and imaginings to prudently guide our own behaviour.

It’s about always learning, always thinking, always acting – it’s most definitely not about standing still. “If you choose life, you choose movement and engagement and feeling and thinking and loving and hurting and learning and failing and succeeding. That’s the key to vital living, choose it all”

BRAIN POWER

Our extraordinary human powers do not derive from our muscles and bones, but from our collective wit. Together, our minds have spawned civilizations and technologies through which we have changed the face of the Earth, while even our closest animal relatives live quietly in their dwindling forests.

Spark! by Norah Casey, published by Penguin is available at harmonia.ie

My basic thesis is that you can live fully in every chapter of your life. When people ask me how, that is my answer: living vitally. Relish the good and don’t fear the bad. Keep your brain active and hungry for new information and feed that hunger every day.

Keep your body vital and healthy and active, too. Enjoy Life with all the bumps and highs.