Just Add Soul

If you want feeling in your life, you have to add it; soul won’t come to you.

Soul doesn’t just exist by itself.

Things that come to you are lifeless. Not dead, necessarily, but without that spark that makes them special.

Special = soul = life.

My children know this. Yours, too. Better than most adults, in fact.

Elle, for instance, has a stuffed animal she wouldn’t trade for all the world. I once came home with a substitute for her mawed up, stinky, green-gray blob of a stuffed frog, but she’d have none of it; the new, brightly-colored frog had no soul.

As adults, we constantly get this backward. It’s sort of amazing, really, that we actually move away from this knowledge as we get older! In an attempt to take what we think the world owes us, we let the soul drift out right out of our lives.

Luxury cars, gift cards, and convenient drive-thru coffee, for example, rob us of that spark that makes life special. Instead of embracing the dents and dings that make our cars uniquely our own, we get aggravated about the decrease in resale value. Gift cards isolate us from having to demonstrate that we have been paying attention to what makes someone happy. Drive thru coffee runs keep us from meeting our neighbors.

We lament the loss of soul in our lives. But instead of put it back in, we do something that is the absolute pinnacle of irony: we try to buy it.

Here’s a clue: can’t happen.

Not even Apple, Lexus, or Polo can put soul back in our lives.

The only way to get soul back into your life… is to put soul back in your life.

Before you upgrade your car to the most expensive you can afford, or do something else out of either a sense of “I deserve this” or “I like the convenience,” ask yourself: are you adding soul to your life, or just stuff?

The kid in you will know the answer.

Jason Seiden is Co-founder and CEO of Ajax Social Media, a training company that shows professionals how use social media to work more effectively.