Wasting a moment
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” wrote Annie Dillard. When I read the Dillard quote a week ago, the image that popped into my mind was not about a day but a minute. The image was a clock that hung in the front left corner about 10 feet off the ground just over my high school Geometry teacher Mr. Deroin’s right shoulder as he stood behind a podium. I am sitting in the front desk in the row closest to the windows just under the clock. My 15 year old neck tilted easily upward urging the click that will signal the minute hand to thrust forward, from 1:12 to 1:13.
I wanted 1:12 to be 1:13. And then 1:14…until 1:21 and the end of Geometry class. I was living one minute in the future wasting away in Davenport, Iowa 14 years before Jimmy Buffet was doing the same in Margaritaville.
I am guessing Dillard meant the “of course” in the quote above ironically, at least as it applies to me. The idea that my life is best thought as the cumulation of increments – days, but also minutes and hours – is not obvious to me. Here are two practices that have helped me experience the wonder in each moment, hour and day. And that also serve as antidotes to despair.
How many days do I have left?
One way to think in life increments is to see the increments. I use the Days Calculator web site every so often to remind myself of the bits that have made up my life. When I checked it a few moments ago, I discovered that from my birth date of September 20, 1949 I have lived:
37,738,080 minutes
628,968 hours
26,207 days
And then I use the The Social Security Actuarial Table to tell me how much time I have left. From today, it offers me:
7, 057,440 minutes
117,624 hours
4901 days
4901 days remaining. Hmm. Seeing my past and future life in its increments, brought home the power of a favorite quote about the meaning of life, from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning:
We [The prisoners of Auschwitz] needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly…Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.
When I behold each moment, each hour, each day of my life, I am less likely to starve it of meaning, to waste it away by wishing for the next moment.
The certainty of death
Of course, those numbers about my future minutes, hours and days are an illusion. Maybe I have more. My mother lived to be 96 and one of her sisters 103. Or maybe less. My father died of cancer at my age. But this chimera, that I have 4901 days left, is more useful than the default fantasy that purrs away in the background of my thinking. When I bring it to the foreground, it goes something like this.
Dying is something that happens to other people. Not to me.
The Population Research Institute estimates that 117 billion Homo Sapiens have lived on earth, including the 7 billion alive today. That means 110 billion people have died. Having been lucky enough to live, I am certain I will die. To combat my illusion about death, I occasionally use a death mediation I learned from the late Indian Jesuit priest Anthony DeMello who wrote in Awareness:
I’ve often said to people that the way to really live is to die. The passport to living is to imagine yourself in your grave. Imagine that you’re lying flat in your coffin and you’re dead. See the body decomposing, then the bones, then it all turning to dust. Now look at your problems from that viewpoint. Changes everything, doesn’t it? Do this for a minute or so every day and you’ll come alive.
There is nothing more wondrous than this moment
I don’t want the 15 year old Paul sitting in Geometry class thinking about how many days he has left or the certainty of his death. He’s got to be in what the psychotherapist Irvin Yalom in Staring at the Sun calls the everyday mode. He’s just trying to figure out HOW to get through the world.
On the other hand, 71 year old Paul finds it useful to awaken to what Yalom calls the ontological mode. This type focuses not on the HOW of the world, but
The miracle of being itself and marvel THAT things are, THAT you are.
I have lived long enough to know that many of my moments, hours, and days have been filled with pain. Life is hard, for all of us. A brief survey of the news or of history offer too damn many examples. If the present is painful, yearning for the future is a rational choice. And despair is tempting.
Yet, moments are all I have, all you have. Even if some of them are full of pain. I have found that regular reminders of the miracle of my brief moment of existence are enough to balance the sadness, with wonder.
