Life is all about celebrating it by doing stuff I like. Feeling good and striving to feel good is our natural state of being. It’s our innate North Star. And life is as simple as that: living a life that you enjoy.
My lifelong companion…
…Is this mindset—living a life that I enjoy—and it’s been with me my whole life. I don’t remember arriving at it so much as always having it. What changed is that other people started to notice it. During 2020, going through surgeries for colon cancer and liver metastasis, seven months of chemo within a year, and — to top it off — the worst phase of the COVID-19 pandemic with a badly weakened immune system, the nurses in the oncology department, along with family and friends, kept remarking on how I was navigating it. Not because I’d built something new to cope. Because a way of thinking that had simply always been mine turned out to look different from how most people move through hard things, and it became visible in a way it hadn’t been before. They asked me to share it. This is that.
It’s grounded first in life experience — in having lived by it long before it was tested in a very challenging situation. Along the way, various theories and philosophies have helped me name and understand what experience had already shown me, more than they shaped it in the first place.
A Life Beverino
If there’s a name for the method underneath all this — a philosophy of the simplicity of life, really — it’s Beverino. My father wrote three books on the wines of Piemonte. Once, he asked an old local winegrower what made a wine good. The man shrugged: if I like it, I usually say it’s beverino. No scale, no expert vocabulary — just, I like it, so it’s good.
I’ve applied that same logic to living: fill your glass, your days, with what you genuinely like. Listen to your gut before your heart decides how, and your head decides what. Walk your talk. Be loyal to yourself, and compassionate with yourself, even when it isn’t easy.
I follow this out loud, day to day, on the blog and on Instagram — [@alifebeverino], #ALifeBeverino.
Enjoy your day as your life beverino way.
Love and hugs,
/Cathrin
Your blog sounds delightful, Cathrin! I have known you for a very long time and I know that you have definitely learned how to stay on top like a bubble in a stream. You have been living your life investigating and exploring and making the best of whatever comes your way and I deeply admire you for that.
Best wishes on your new endeavor and I look forward to enjoying many more thoughts coming from you in the future.