Particularly study. I love learning, but assignments and exams suck. The dopamine centres in my brain feel so utterly satisfied ticking something gigantic off the Life To-Do List, and there is now wide open mental space, full of burgeoning possibilities.
Do you know what the best thing about something finishing is? It means something else gets to start! What delicious adventures await next??
October 6, 2007, I woke up after submitting my last assignment for my last course for my degree. I felt like a weight had been lifted, and I woke up so light and breezy, back to my carefree, giggling, girlish self. I was no longer a student, and I felt so free!
I vividly remember one phrase searing through my consciousness: Today is the first day of the rest of your life!
Several hours later, I dumped my boyfriend.
You see, we'd been in this on-again-off-again toxic mess and he was all 'let's get married in a few years' and that induced panic attacks in 20-year-old me. He adored me and worked very hard to be the perfect boyfriend. It took me a long time to realise it, but I wasn't so much in love with him, as I was in love with the idea of being loved. I'd like to think we've all fallen victim to that at some point. Maybe; maybe not. Maybe I'm just a bitch. Either way, he had to go.
2 months later, I had gotten an internship and moved to Laos. The winds of change in my life are like the winds of Wellington - swift and often. I seek out adventure and change, working on the premise that life is short and you need to make the most of it. I also really love quotes that help to remind you of that.
When I first heard this expression as a teen, I used to conjure images of a perfect day where it was beautifully sunny, where we started with pancakes and ice cream for breakfast and I was surrounded by friends and family, heading to the beach, lounging in the sun, playing beach cricket, surfing on picturesque peaks and bobbing up and down in the ocean. We would dance into the night and then sail off into the sunset on a boat towards the horizon.
... Where I would then meet my doom??? This fantasy conveniently ended before then.
The more I said this quote to myself throughout my teens and early twenties, the less sense it made to me.
Who are these people to whom Steve Jobs is speaking that live their life like ornamental china on the shelf, waiting for a special occasion to use it?
I found that the more I embraced this philosophy, the less I looked to the future. My focus shifted to choosing short term happiness over long term happiness. I privileged instant gratification and shunned anything that required significant long-term planning and definitely anything that required sacrifice or pain.
Caramel slice or no? Well, if today could be my last day, then obviously I would've wanted to include caramel slice! If today was the last day of my life, why would I bother with exercise, servicing my car, calling my friends back, paying off my credit card, I reasoned to myself. All of these things started to be more and more pointless to me.
Then it occurred to me.
I had it all backwards.
I needed to be working towards something. Not death. That's weird. But building something important. Creating something. Being a part of something that is meaningful and valuable.
Most likely, you're not going to know when you're last day is, and I'm sure when it occurs, it is probably not going to go to plan. That's not how these things generally play out.
Despite our best efforts to plan ahead, some events cannot be planned for. Even if you did know it was coming up, I bet how you would actually spend your last day, and how you think you'd spend your last day, would probably be vastly different depending on the circumstances.
In what circumstances are you going to have an option of what you do on your last day, unless you're some magic genie fortune teller type - and if you were, surely a good one would be able to ward off their own demise?
Enough morbidity.
This reminded me of something I wrote when I lived in Laos in 2008.
When I was little, my 3 brothers and I spent countless hours building things. Duplo bricks were a favourite, as were lego, K’nex, mobilo, train sets, and anything involving sand, mud, rocks or sticks. We made kingdoms and castles, cities and farmyards, gardens and dungeons, tunnel networks and towers, ships and seas, dams and huts. We would use every brick to make these wonderful creations, spanning the entire length of the house or reaching for the roof, commandeering entire strips of beach with an intricate tunnel network or almost toppling trees in our eagerness to make a tree hut.
Our only limits were the amount of bricks, the height of the ceiling and our imaginations. The unbounded glee and satisfaction of creating something so ingeniously brilliant was unrivalled and often mum would be commissioned to take photos or at least spend a mandatory minute extolling its virtues.
Seldom were these creations allowed to stand for more than a day though, and we packed our
bricks away and they lay in wait until the next day, ready as always to help us realise,
brick by brick, the next epic imagined invention.
As we grew, the time between these magnificent creations grew as well, and it has now
been at least a decade since the Duplo has been touched. Nevertheless, the innate love of
creating things has never really quelled, only perhaps been overridden by other pursuits.
Or maybe it is the bricks that have changed.
Maybe now we build with days, effort, time and intention. What if we perceived every day of our lives as a building block?
We are constantly reminded that human lives are brief, uncertain and fragile. Life is
compared to a wisp of smoke, a breath of wind, a shadow. No day is guaranteed, and you
never know when you may breathe your last.
Despite the fleeting nature of our existence, we do still exist. Compared to mountains, rocks and trees, our days are few, we do still have some days. No matter how fleeting and insignificant a life
may seem, it can still make a difference. Each day that you have air in your lungs is contributing towards your life-building, the creation that you’re creating day by day with the bricks of your life. What are you building with your life today?
Some seem to be happy throwing each day onto the ‘I’ll make something of my life later’
pile, tossing day after day into a heap, shapeless and degenerate. Others are building empires, using
their bricks – and others' too – to forge ahead and collect more, amassing wealth and
prestige from the magnitude of their creation, insatiable in their appetite for more.
There are those who are using their blocks to create a library of knowledge, consuming books and
seeking intellectual conversation, or those who seek to build a stadium so they and all
their friends can enjoy the latest concert or sports game.
Others are constructing roads to places never seen or staircases to take others to greater heights.
Whether people realise it or not, they’re constructing something with their lives.
So often I hear platitudes like ‘seize the day’ or ‘live like there’s no tomorrow’ or ‘make
each day count’. The formula impressed on me is to recite a few of these and you’re sure to have a successful and focused day. These are all well and good, but for me they incite a frenzied panic because what if today really was my last day? And I’ve spent it doing things like paying bills and
getting hair cuts rather than bungee-jumping and surfing???
And what about all those things I want to do that take more than a day? Like building a career or creating relationships? I always got the impression that when you're seizing the day, each day is solitary, singular, as if we live like mayflies. If I really do live like there’s no tomorrow, I would never have any money, any sleep or any plans because there’s no tomorrow to warrant them.
I think a better perspective would be each day is a block in the creation of your life, whatever your making that to be. So maybe a better question is ‘What am I building with my life?’ or ‘What part of the building am I making today?’. This gives purpose to today as well as direction and focus for tomorrow. It encourages us to seek long-term goals rather than short-term nihilistic indulgence.
If our days really are that fleeting and our time so short, the obvious next question to me would be ‘Is
what your building worthy of your time and energy?’.
What blueprints are on your heart? What is it that you yearn to create? Is there a problem you could solve with your building? A bridge you could construct between two places, two parties, two ideas? If your heart yearns to build a mansion, why would you bother with a doll’s house? You only get one shot at today, so why would you spend it on trivialities, wasting your time, talents and blocks?
The only thing that will outlive you on this earth is your legacy, what you’ve made of
your life, and the impression that you've made on people along the way. So, indeed, carpe diem! Seize the day! But let today be the first of a string of purposeful days. Let today place another block on your life-building that reflects the blueprint of your heart.
Live each day as if it's your last didn't resonate with me at all, so I searched for a better life paradigm and found this:
Not a new idea, but I thought this was brilliant! This is like an artist with a blank canvas, the beginning of a new adventure!
And it comes with better questions. I think a much more apt questions are
Who do you want to be?
What do you want to build?
How will today count towards that goal?
It turns out that I'm not at all the first person to have a problem with this live like today was your last theory.
This season that we are going through can be quite daunting and for the more philosophical of us, awaken a lot of questions like 'What are we doing with our lives?', 'Is our current normal OK/sustainable?' 'What will the external world look like in a 6 months, a year?', or 'What do I want my want my internal world to look like in 6 months or a year?'.
A piece of advice I heard about dealing with the great milieu of uncertainty we're going through at the moment is to grab hold of something you can control, and control the heck out of it. (Preferably not another person. I've found they're quite difficult to try and control.) Your wardrobe, your house, your internal dialogue, your routine, your diet, your shed, your friend list, or the copious amount of ideas for blogs posts and stories floating around in your head. Pick something, and grab it with both hands and wrestle that sucker until it is malleable and manageable, and you are victorious.
If you wanna apply this philosophy to a bottle of wine also, then cheers!
Maybe it is not the time to be musing about such things, as we swing between extremes of boredom and panic, but maybe it is? If it's not, shelf it, and veg for a little while. But you'll find about week 3, after all the jobs you've invented to do for yourself are done, and you're left only with yourself and your life to ponder upon, that it might be time to do some existential pondering. After all, when better to start than right now?
Does this resonate with you?
If it does, great. If it doesn't...
...It's a great philosophy for me.
I used to ardently believe that when someone else had a winning life formula, if I just adopted that, I'd be as awesome and amazing as they are. I kept getting caught out, because I wasn't them though.
It's not that simple. It not as simple as x+y = Z, the awesome, changed and amazing. Someone else's x might work for them in the equation of their life. If you simply transplant it, it's more likely to show an error message.
You are all unique and nuanced and shit. If you want to adopt someone else's life philosophy, you need to make it bespoke. You need to own it, put your signature blend of you into it. Hold on tightly to what works and sift out what doesn't. If a 12 step programme works for you, brilliant. If it doesn't? Create your own. Find an alternative. Synthesise others habits and philosophies, blend them up until you've found the milkshake that brings all the boys to the yard. Or ladies, if you're that way inclined ;)
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-your-brain-cant-process-the-word-dont_b_596c1dd4e4b022bb9372b2e1
Sometimes your brain can process 'don't', sometimes it can't.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090211122147.htm
One lady's take on it.
https://www.corinamanea.com/the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life/
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