Category: Free yourself

Day of decision

“You did this,” he murmured to the man in the mirror. “Every step and misstep brought you to this place. Oh, you had some help and some enablers along the way, but the responsibility is all yours. No one manipulated your fate to put you here; this is the sum total of your every action all tallied together.”

He surveyed the room, thinking, and realized this was so.

“If I had done this before, I would be in a different place now. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second-best time is now. And so now, where do I plant the first tree?”

He surveyed his life and looked for fertile soil. At first he thought he saw only fertilizer, but then he realized it was the despair talking.

“I can do this,” he said. “All I have to do is decide what ‘this’ is.”

Just as he needed to decide, waves of indecision washed over him and held him in place.

“No, not now,” he insisted and resisted. “Now is not the time to sit and wait. The waiting must end. Time now to act.”

But what? Do what? Act how? The choices were endless, and he had to pick one.

“Of course! I can — no, that would — then this — this is the way — but that might lead me down to —”

The second guesses led to third guesses and on beyond zebra. “Are you really making Dr. Suess references now?” he scoffed, but the thought made him laugh, and he remembered the admonition to “be silly sometimes.”

“What if I were to be silly every day?” he asked himself, but, “No, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place: I overdosed on silliness. Or was I not silly enough? Should I have taken silly to the next level?”

And just like that, he was focused on the past again.

“Stop looking back, this is today,” he repeated like a mantra, until he worked his way back to the present moment. All was fuzzy around him, but that was his aging eyes fooling him. Clarity began to arrive, slowly but decidedly.

“Decidedly,” he sighed. “That word again. I really must decide what to do. Bold action all at once. Oh, no, baby steps, one at a time. What am I going to do?”

He took a next step, and it was the one that made all the difference.

Timely thoughts

Our “smart” devices fell back to Standard Time early this morning, and if we found every clock without a mind of its own last night, all of our clocks were “right” when we woke up.

It is a futile exercise — no matter how we set the clocks, we will have 10 hours and 11 minutes of daylight today. No daylight was saved during “daylight-saving time,” and no daylight is given back when Standard Time returns. We just change our frame of reference for reasons lost, ironically enough, to time.

As an early riser, I don’t object to sunrise coming up “an hour earlier,” because I enjoy watching the light outside slowly grow. If I had my way, we would always be on Standard Time, so the sun would rise around 4 a.m. in June, but whoever makes these decisions doesn’t want the sun in their eyes as they finish off a good night’s sleep, so they adjust the clock so the sun is in their eyes when they turn in for the night.

We each have 24 hours a day to do what we will, including the same amount of daylight whether we call it 7:00 or 8:00.

What we do with that time is more important than what time it is. It makes no difference if we decided finally to take action at 6:43 in the morning or 2:22 in the afternoon; what matters is the act. Whether it is too soon or too late is a matter of judgment — the action itself is what’s important.

We spend a lot of time — let me rephrase that — we waste a lot of time looking back with regrets. The present moment is all we control at any given time. We can assess whether a past action was a triumph or an oops — usually it’s somewhere in between — but allowing lingering melancholy over the passage of time and past actions takes away from what needs to be done in the here and now. Our earthly vessels are allotted a finite length of time, which naturally grows shorter by the minute, so it behooves us to waste as few precious moments as possible.

No, I do not consider it a waste to take time every morning to pick up a pen and fill at least three pages with my sometimes silly and often meaningless scratchings. Yes, I do chide myself when minutes and hours disappear into the void of antisocial media.

Even then, the antisocial platforms do serve the original purpose of giving friends a convenient space to interact. I am aware of what has become of friends and colleagues from 10, 20, 50 and 60 years ago, thanks to such platforms. To the extant that it ties us back together, each platform is a wonderful tool. I can do without whatever it is that draws us to fritter away precious moments staring at ads, vicious attacks and lies, and other material that exploits or appeals to the worst in us.

Every Sunday at precisely 9 a.m., my iPhone informs me how many hours and minutes I averaged staring at its screen in the past week. The number never fails to leave me aghast. Imagine if I’d spent that time on meaningful pursuits.

But I digress. I’d best be off applying this no-longer-saved daylight to its best use.

George Harrison reminded us

Listen to this post:

All things must pass. Nothing lasts forever.

That is a scary thought when life is going well, and an encouraging word when it isn’t.

In the middle of a wonderful experience, the knowledge that all things pass is a reason to savor the moment to its fullest. In the middle of an ordeal, the knowledge that all things pass is a reason for hope and an incentive to endure. There is “a time to mourn and a time to dance”; everything, indeed, has its season. 

Sometimes these seasons end suddenly, and sometimes we have time to prepare as best as we can. The only certainty is that it will end. It’s a sad fact: Even if we are able to fulfill the vow that “till death do we part,” for example, we acknowledge in the vow that we will part one day.

Once bitten by this fact and exposed to the devastating pain of that parting, a person can withdraw and never emerge to share again. I think that’s a tragedy; I would not wish a lonely life as a hermit on my loved one after I’m gone. And we each are capable of giving all we have, as long as we live. Life does goes on after loss.

In the meantime, the most important message I can offer is to savor the time while it is happening. Let the knowledge that it will pass encourage you to love and live life with everything you’ve got.