The month of January and we are driving from our home in Maryland down to Florida to visit a friend. It is also a drive to get away from the weariness of the winter that is already three months old and has been slowly chipping away at the reserves of our patience of mostly living indoors, facing the slow progression of days with gray skies, needing to change clothes every time we have to step outside.
It is time to take a break to warmer climes and shore up our resilience to last through the rest of the winter, and perhaps remind ourselves that eventually summer, once again, will slowly move northward and will grace us again.
It is a drive to build up hope and live through another three months of winter that are ahead of us.
I look down on the dashboard and just at that moment the odometer ticks upward another mile. The GPS reminds me that there are still 364 miles to go and ETA is 6.43 pm.
364 miles. It is a yardstick to measure how far away we are from our destination. If I was Captain Kirk on the deck of the starship Enterprise, he might glance at the various dials on the control panel to inform him that he is 16 light days away from docking and having much needed shore leave to rest their battle weary bones after having a run with Klingons.
On the other spectrum of things, if I was a snail trying to go from one part of the garden to the other, and in doing so if my odometer ticked steadily by 1 foot every couple of minutes, I would have been mighty pleased with my progress.
A Mile. A light day. A foot. An Angstrom. A Nautical Mile. They all are yardsticks, and units, for measuring distances. Sometimes they are used for letting us know how far we are from our goals.
Those yardsticks are attempting to measure something in a physical world. Complementing those, there also are yardsticks to measure our psychological well being.
We all have filled out various surveys in our life. Surveys to rate your happiness on the scale of 1-10. After hanging up with a call to customer service, surveys for the level of our satisfaction on the scale of 1-5.
Or just after we step out of the restaurant after an evening of dining out, a chime on my phone informing me, and what I already know, is a message from Google asking please tell us how the dinner was.
There are yardsticks to measure the more serious side of our psychological well-being - yardsticks to measure level of depression, our happiness etc.
You name it, and there is a yardstick for it. Without them, we do not know where we are or where we are heading to, whether in the physical or the psychological realm.
Without yardsticks, we are lost souls, drifting in a shoreless sea.
How about yardsticks to measure progress? Progress in learning a new skill? Progress in forming a new habit? Progress in meeting our new year resolutions? or…
…yardstick for just measuring how successful a framework of living will be in bringing us closer to the goal we are aiming for?
Now that I have decided on a framework for living to guide my days, how to determine that it is actually working, and if I follow it, at the end of my life would I be able to tell myself that the life was well lived.
If I can put the outcomes from the day that result from my following the chosen framework for my living into a chromatograph, and can it print out a slip that based on some yardstick that says yay or nay whether my day was well lived or not, that would be a good instrument to have.
If the printout consistently says nay, then I know that it is time to make tweaks to my framework for living and see if changes lead to a different outcome. And hopefully, by tuning the framework for living, I would eventually land on the correct path for living.
Pondering about a simple yardstick, I think the following could work. At the end of the day when it's time to go to bed, I can take five minutes, step back and ask if it was a day I would like to live again tomorrow? If I am given the opportunity, would I choose to live this day again the way it was? If the answer is yes, then indeed it was a day well lived.
On the other hand, if the answer is a no, I could then consider what would I have done differently (either by adding something to the day or taking out something that I did) that would have resulted in a more positive response to the question whether the day was well lived.
If I can come up with an answer, then tomorrow, either I could be more intentional in my choices that fit better with the framework for living I have, or if I made some tweaks in my framework for living, and perhaps, the prospect of having a day well lived would improve.
So, a simple yardstick is to look back at happenings during the day and ask - would I like to repeat the same day tomorrow? If the answer is yes, I can head to bed with a peaceful mind and look forward to getting up tomorrow and living another day.
And now an hour has gone by. I looked down at the odometer and the number had ticked up by 63 miles. I am getting closer to the sunshine state while thinking how to ensure that this life will be well lived.
Ciao
Summary
1. A Mile. A light day. A foot. An Angstrom. A Nautical Mile. They all are yardsticks for measuring distances.
2. Likewise, there also are yardsticks to measure our psychological well being.
3. Is there a yardstick to measure whether a day was well lived?
4. If at the end of the day we look back and say that we would not mind living them again, that is a good yardstick to measure if our day was well lived or not.
Related:
Building a framework for living #1: Becoming aware of mortality
Building a framework for living #2: The basic premise for its need
Building a framework for living #3: Follow the advice from stoics
Building a framework for living #4: The basic principles
Building a framework for living #5: Working with the fundamental unit that makes a life
Building a framework for living #6: The alchemy of fulfilling days
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