A well-lived life means wasting some time
I regularly get letters from readers. I very much appreciate these; thank you so much for sending them! I am glad my writing is making a difference. But yesterday I received a social media DM that made me pause and think. The writer told me that I should live my life to the fullest, and he advised that I should, as he did, live as if each day was my last.
This is a bad piece of advice, though it sounds intuitively sensible. For one thing, it cannot be literally true. The final day of someone's life is rarely their best day, so it's not something we should literally strive for. It seems things are more enjoyable when we think they will last forever. Some of the sweetest memories of youth are those where we believed things would go on forever; for example, the summer holidays spent in the countryside with grandparents, when we believed these elderly people as immortal as our school years were eternal.
But how about a less literal meaning? The advice then sounds eminently sensible: pack your life full of meaning, as if you only have little time left. The memento mori calendar (pictured) uses this idea, letting you color in all the weeks you've lived. It optimistically goes up until age eighty. The calendar's makers promise that it will give you “improved focus, a heightened perspective on life, and a rush of motivation to take consistent action.”
The underlying thought seems to be that you've got to do stuff, because otherwise you haven't really lived. Such views are eerily adjacent to our obsession with work performance and metrics. The desire to pour our lives into metrics and numbers is irresistible. You've undoubtedly seen these lists with items such as “Got arrested. Got a tattoo. Got drunk” where you add up the points and then share them proudly on social media, to say and to reassure yourself: yes, I have truly lived.
For the calendar, it's important to note that historically, this is not what memento mori meant. Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius thought about the fleetingness of life and our achievements, and that we should keep that firmly in mind so we have some distance from the fruits of our action (so not, like some modern stoics, as a productivity trick). Christians in the middle ages and early modern period used memento mori imagery to remind themselves to be virtuous, and to look to the afterlife, a reward in Heaven or punishment in Hell, as what really mattered. So, it was not at all a focus on making the most of this life, but rather to be mindful of what happens after we die.
Let me offer a counterpoint to the well-intentioned advice of that letter writer to “live life to the fullest.” I have contemplated mortality a lot lately, and have come to the idea that wasting time is an essential part of a well-lived life. To feel hurried the whole time drains you, and to pack your life full of things that look good on paper (bucket list items) rarely gives you satisfaction.
You need to dawdle and dream. You need to leave enough empty space in your life to feel and experience, and simply let yourself be you. Hurrying from one thing to the next, in order to make sure your life is full enough is not going to satisfy you but merely craving for more.
I like Zhuangzi's image of the big gnarly tree. In book one of the Zhuangzi, Huizi complains about a tree. “Its trunk is too gnarled and bumpy to apply a measuring line to, its branches too bent and twisty to match up to a compass or square.”
Zhuangzi replies that his friend should “relax and do nothing by its side, or lie down for a free and easy sleep under it. Axes will never shorten its life, nothing can ever harm it. If there’s no use for it, how can it come to grief or pain?” He makes a series of sophisticated points on usefulness and how being useful often means that you are a mere means for someone else's aims (e.g., your employer), which I discuss in this piece with Pauline Lee.
Dawdling, dreaming, and doodling, making space for friends and family, eventually if you do it enough you will feel less guilty about not doing enough. Because we could always be doing more, we often end up with a feeling of guilt. We feel guilt that we are not playing with our children when we're working from home, and we feel guilt that we are not working when we make time to play with our children.
I feel a lot less guilty than I ever did before for not doing much, even though I am not doing much, because I am not trying to maximize my productivity. Before I received my diagnosis, I was always on the perpetual point of burnout. Now, I rest when I need to, eat when I need to, nourish my mind with interesting fiction. It would be a good experience if it weren't for the pain I keep on feeling, the uncertainty of the outcome of this illness, and the two quite challenging major surgeries that left permanent damage.
After about a month of being ill, I felt my mind come to rest in a way it hadn't done for a long time. I felt a spiritual sense that I hadn't experienced for a long time. I began a sketchbook (pictured below) to draw some animals and plants I see in my immediate surroundings. I am thinking a lot, and definitely if I have enough lifetime left, I am hoping to convert these thoughts into writing. I can already feel myself change, but I am in no hurry. I don’t have a big bucket list of wishes. I have no regrets. Life can be lived at a gentler pace.
I so agree with this. My own ongoing relationship with death has brought me to the conclusion that it's important to try to maintain a balance between the "big" things you'd want to have done before you die and the "small" things that make every day a bit more joyful. Quotation marks because I don't think those words capture the actual bigness or smallness of the feelings themselves.
I'm lucky enough to have come very close to death a few times, and yet to have survived, and each time I have been shown what I would regret. Sometimes it's what I would have expected, sometimes it isn't. But the times when I've been most satisfied with my pre-death feelings have been when I've been doing as much of what I wanted to do as possible within realistic parameters.
Thank you, as always, for your writing <3
Right on! Idleness is as important to mental health as sleep. Would you want music to always be at full throttle? Music is best when it has spaces and lulls, fast parts and slow parts, loud parts and soft parts. Likewise, life. How can you appreciate life if you never stop and reflect on it?