Most of us live as if 'death' is far away from the 'now'.
I did too, until two things happened.
First, my sister’s stage four cancer diagnosis. This taught me that life is loosely 40% shorter than what you think it is.
The second was my own near-death experience. Without warning, I faced a vasovagal response to sharp force trauma, which resulted in loss of consciousness. This taught me that life just quite literally abruptly ends.
There is no glamorous ending to the sludge. There is no closure. There is no final chapter where everything gets tallied and made to mean something.
If there’s a reward for a life well-lived, it has to be paid out during the living, because there is no 'after'.
So, what does it mean to live a life well-lived?
My answer is: to actually be in it. Not observing it, not narrating it, not waiting for it to start. In it.
I recognize how much of a platitude this sounds, so let me preface.
Psychologists have a name for something most of us discover on our own: the hedonic treadmill. When something good happens to us we feel happier, and then over the following weeks our mood drifts back to about where we were. The same thing happens with bad events. Our baseline of happiness is remarkably stubborn- and always returning.
Think about what that implies. Every external improvement fades back to baseline.
Thus, past a certain point, what determines how a day feels is not what happens in it, but how you meet it. A life is a collection of years, each made of months, weeks, days, and minutes. How you meet those minutes is utterly and completely yours.
Most of us hand that lever away anyway. We wait for the next thing to make us happy. We decide in advance that we'll be content once something arrives. Which means that right now, today, we've decided not to be.
I've done this. I still catch myself doing it. Stepping off isn't easy. But I've noticed a few things that help.
- The first is to notice where your attention is actually pointing to. A surprising amount of mine used to point at other people: what they thought of me, what they were doing that I wasn't, who I'd be if they saw me a certain way.
- The second is to stop playing your life in third person. I used to imagine myself doing interesting things the way you'd watch a character in a video game, with the camera floating behind and above, an audience implied. I'd picture people seeing me succeed. But the audience was never there. Nobody is watching the feed. When you switch to first person, the question changes from "how will this look?" to "what is this like?"
- The third is to let go of the fear that you're missing something. For example, the people who are right for you will find you by doing what you actually care about, wholeheartedly.
There's an obvious objection to all this: If you're content wherever you are, why do anything? Isn't contentment just a nicer word for giving up?
I don't think so. The video game analogy is why. Playing in third person doesn't make you more ambitious. It just means you're performing for an audience that isn't there. You still climb the mountain in first person. You just climb it for the view, not the photo. Contentment doesn't take away the wanting. It takes away the waiting: the belief that you can't be all right until you get there.
So as long as you allow yourself to be content, the things that will happen in your life will align with the content version of you!
Indeed, every contemplative tradition says some version of this. But I didn't believe it until two events made it impossible not to. Life is short, and it ends without ceremony. Whatever is good about it has to be good now.
So, like they say, “throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
I’ll see you around ;]