The Prime of Our Lives
Why it matters how we embrace the day
This week’s Meditation at a glance:
Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of what his day would hold. Rather than running from the issues at hand, he properly set his mindset on what could potentially befall him. This week, we explore the task of taking on the day and embracing our lives in the present moment.
Life is a transitory adventure. We’re here on the planet for a limited time and within that time have the ability to decide how we want to live our lives. Or, as the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, our lives are "a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness."
The Stoics would say it is what we do between those two darknesses that matter most.
Each of us has a choice to make every day—am I going to take on the day, a blank slate and fresh start, or am I going to allow the day to just roll in?
Marcus Aurelius famously prepared for his days by grounding himself in what the day would likely hold:
“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly.”
Yet he goes on further to remind himself that while these people will be the ones to disturb his day and attempt acts he would prefer they not, they are still there for a reason.
“None of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness… We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. To feel anger at someone, to turn your back on him: these are obstructions.”
Little do we realize how our days are shaped by the way we approach them every morning. Nor do we realize how short and limited those days are. We allow ourselves to shrug off a lost day and say that we will handle the task tomorrow. Thomas Jefferson’s famous phrase of “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today,” has become cliché, and yet, it still holds the truth of what Marcus was trying to prepare himself for. The lost day becomes the lost week which becomes the lost month. Time is compounding by nature.
It is easy within life to push off the things we do not want to deal with whether it be tasks, people, or responsibilities. We have every excuse in the book too as to why we shouldn’t do the thing that needs to get done—my body hurts, I don’t have the time, I have other things that need tending. These are ultimately excuses because the hard fact is, these days, the one’s we’re putting stuff off from, they’re the prime of our life. The Greeks had a word for acting like this, “akrasia,” the knowledge of acting against our better judgments.
Eventually the body gets tired while the spirit remains young. We are no longer able to approach life physically like we once did. It usually takes a midlife crisis for us to discover these feelings of existentialism, to understand that each day we take in is a gift and should be approached with care and dedication rather than haphazard awareness.
As Kieran Setiya reminds us in his book Midlife, we all hold within us mistakes, misfortunes, and failures from our first half of life--we cannot reach the halfway point without having accumulated them. But what matters most is not what we have or haven’t done in that first half, it is what we do with the lessons learned in the first half and how we utilize them in the second half—in the current moment.
This shift in the approach to life does not need to come at the halfway point though, it starts when you want, when you realize you have this single life to do things.
Instead of life rolling in like a series of waves, we need to tackle the day head on. It is this life, the only one we have, that we need to embrace every day.
It all starts with how you start your morning. The attitude you bring to the day. Are you going to approach it with vigor and determination? Or are you going to allow it to come at you like the crashing of waves?
Only you can decide.
Three Bullet Summary:
Life is transitory and fleeting, we only have today.
How we approach our days determines the outcome of our lives.
Do not put off today what can be done and approach the day with determination.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo