Why we started living Lagom

So this is our first blog! I (Amy) am excited and petrified in equal amounts to be writing (but mainly publishing) this.

We’ve had the idea to start a blog for over a year now. We bought the domain names, we registered La Vida Lagom as a limited company (the idea is to build a business in the future) and whilst we have shared our progress on our Instagram page (our_jaggers_journey) we’ve not yet done anything with La Vida Lagom – mainly for fear that it wouldn’t be good enough – we didn’t have enough to say and no-one would read it!

But our motto is that we are striving for progress not perfection and you can’t make progress if you don’t start somewhere – so here we are – starting! It won’t be perfect – we’re not perfect – life isn’t perfect – but it will be honest and real and will hopefully convey that normal people can make simple changes that can help to live a more intentional, sustainable and fulfilling life.

We started making changes to our life in 2018 following a very stressful period at work and pretty much getting to breaking point. We were burnt out – we had no more resilience – it was impacting our health, wellbeing and relationship – something had to change.

I started searching for ways to better manage our work life balance and came across a Pinterest article on Lagom. It was a concept that just clicked with us – we could see that applying lagom could restore balance to life. It wasn’t extreme, it was simple. Lagom focuses on living with just enough – not too much – not too little. Just the right amount to be happy – just the right amount of things – just the right amount of time.

Anna Brones, in her book ‘Live Lagom’, explains that in a chaotic modern world we are craving more balance, more equality, more simplicity. It is hard to put a name to it but we are seeking a feeling of contentment. She explains that lagom is part personal balance and part social understanding – it is good for us and the world around us.

This was us. Life was too chaotic. ‘Busy’ was seen as a badge of honour and the standard response to anyone asking us how we were. We were living on auto pilot. Life was controlling us rather than us controlling life. We were craving something different but we were so overwhelmed with life we didn’t know how to change.

However, once we started to practice living lagom that started to change. It was slow and steady progress (and is still progressing), but that is the thing with living lagom – it makes you slow down, it makes you think about what you are doing, why you are doing it and what benefit it brings. It is an intentional practice and through practicing the concepts of lagom across the 8 dimensions of our personal wellbeing (Financial, Environmental, Social, Physical, Emotional, Spiritual, Intellectual and Occupational) we are now feeling so much happier and balanced than we were.

We still have work to do, especially currently with COVID-19 being a constant consideration and limiter to what we can do, but we have made great changes to the way we live and we are excited to share them with you. We hope to inspire you to make some changes for yourselves so that you too can live La Vida Lagom.