Building a framework for living # 6: The alchemy of fulfilling days

 Arun Kumar

I don’t know about you, but the psychological perception of personal time seems to give credence to the idea that space and time are wrapped. Two points close in my past seem far apart, while two points separated by years seem close. 

A year seems to go by in a blink. It was only yesterday that it was 2022 and now it is already almost a month into 2023. 

And yet, when I look back at my childhood, the house I grew up in Mahanagar/India, its memories seem to be from eons ago. It might as well have been the beginning of time, the moment of the big bang. But then, I remind myself that it was only 55 years ago, and visualized that way, the childhood, once again, does not seem that far away.

Come to think of it, we may live to be 90 years, or alternatively, live for 29,200 days. It is the same life span in different measures but the numbers do not give the same psychological  perception for the duration of life lived. Not at least not to me. 

Considering how quickly a day can pass, life counted in days feels so much shorter. If I am lucky, 8500 more days to live. Really?  

The wrapped psychological perception of different yardsticks for the time besides, a day does feel like a more natural yardstick for measuring our life, and perhaps, a good unit to also manage it better.

Facing hardships, are we not told to take it a day at a time.

Day. It is made up of the moments we have between when we get out of the bed in the morning and when we head back to bed again at night.

The moments that make up for the day get carved between moments that are spent on things that need to be done to sustain the basic needs of biology we are and the moments that are discretionary.  

It is the discretionary time that we have to make choices for. Go for a walk in the woods, watch a movie, get sucked up in the universe of bottomless scrolling of google. 

Discretionary time is a responsibility not to be taken lightly. It is how we opt to invest those moments  that tallies up to how life is going to be lived. Perhaps not unlike how we invest in the stock markets adds up to how big or small our nest egg would be.

There is an old saying, take care of days and they will take care of life. Well, I have no clue who said it, but I am sure that it is a natural enough thing to say that somebody must have said it. But if not, I will take credit for it.

And by managing how we live through our days, what do we want our life to be? Perhaps, we all want to have a fulfilling life. 

We want a life when we are nearing the end of the road, looking back, we can say that it was a life well lived. I did what I wanted to do and did it well. I realized the potential. And now, I stand in a place of serenity. I am at peace with the awareness of my mortality. 

Why would one want a life to be any other way?

To be near the end of life and claw our nails in the face of the rock in an attempt to hang on for a few more years sure does not sound like an appealing prospect.

The task of living a fulfilling life intentionally feels so daunting. Where to start? And what if at the moment of reckoning we are asked whether the life we lived was well lived, the answer would be no. By then, it is too late to remedy things.  

That moment of reckoning is so far into the future.  Along the way, what baby steps we should take such that in the end we would pass the finals. We only get one chance at pass or fail. 

On the other hand, if we recognize that it is the passage of days that eventually add up to make this life, and in general, if we strive for our days to be well lived, then it is turn, our life will also be well lived.

Take care of days, and they will take care of your life.

And that is the alchemy of fulfilling days. 

If we can reach a place where our days feel like they are well lived, they magically transform into a life fully lived. That is the magic of compounding.

The beauty of striving for a tractable goal of making a day well lived is that we get to have a large sample to work with and test our framework for living repeatedly.  If something is not working out, we get lots of opportunities to make tweaks along the way. 

Try many things, and if something in the framework for living we selected does not seem to work, make changes, and see if they work better.

What framework for living works and gives us the feeling that the day was fully lived is an individualistic fit. The good fit depends on our innate nature. For a day to be well lived, the glove of our engagements during the day has to fit the contours of our innate nature. 

The choice for the appropriate framework for living is like matching with the receptors on the surface of the cell. A world of microcosm reflecting into the macrocosm. 

The concept of day well lived resulting in a life well lived might be something apparent to you, but it took me a while to realize that if I want to have a fulfilling life, I can just start laying the foundational bricks one day at a time. 

Starting from such a manageable and tangible goal, where the outcome of our efforts is immediately apparent, I can hope to build a Taj Mahal and let it be the personal memory of my ephemeral life.

As for me, realizing the goal of a life well lived was a need to resolve the paradox of living while also being aware of mortality. For that, striving to have a day well lived is definitely therapeutic.

Ciao.

Summary:

1. A day is a natural unit to manage our life.

2. Take care of a day, and it will take care of your life.

3. Days well lived result in a life well lived.

4. We get lots of opportunities to tweak our framework for living so it leads to a day well lived.

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

Retirement is a story…

of being a
newborn again,

with no mother
to hold hands
and teach the basics
to live anew,

learning to walk
when knees are getting
a bit  askew.

A life well lived

The secret of life well lived

is to realize,

and to be

at peace with,

the impermanence of its

seemingly permanent parts -

hairs imperceptibly

turning gray

feel joints begin to ache

watch skin

slowly fray

or,

visiting Venice

for the one last stay.

Building a framework for living # 5: Working with the fundamental unit that makes a life

 Arun Kumar

When we go for our walks in the woods and look around, the tell tale signs of impermanence are everywhere. The ground is littered with fallen trees big and small. Next to them are also young saplings hoping to survive their first yew years and reach for the piece of sky opened up by the fallen trees.

Walking through the woods we have seen this cycle of birth and death so often that it does not elicit any thoughts or the awareness of impermanence. Almost always, obvious signs of impermanence fail to make its mark on our consciousness. 

In the beginning of our own lives, the biological imperative to procreate and propagate our genes to another generation fills up the entirety of our efforts and  vision. Although with the emergence of society, the ways in which the biological directive is implemented have changed, propagating our genes still remains the prime directive, until…

…until we get older and are past the point of needing to meet our biological obligations. The years of retirement, the years of being empty nesters, are the years when what we are doing is not of much relevance to evolution.

With advances in hygiene and medicine, we now live way beyond what procreation would have required. Together with that, we also are fortunate (or unfortunate) to be gifted with consciousness and are aware that there is a future. 

It is in that future, resides our end. 

When the vehicle that we are, starts to shift into lower gear, the thoughts of our own mortality and impermanence start to loom larger and larger.

For some, once the awareness of mortality decides to become a permanent tenant in the consciousness, we are prompted for a change. From that point onwards, to have an equanimous life, while living with the awareness of mortality, we need a framework for living that can resolve the inherent tension between living and dying. 

While confronting mortality we need a framework for living so that when nearing the end of our life, we can say that our life was well lived. It is required so that if the end comes to us unexpectedly, we would be ready to depart in peace.

Having found or created a framework for living, how would we know if it was the correct one for us, and in the end, following it worked? If it is only towards the end of our life we get to evaluate that our chosen framework for living led to a life well lived, and if it turns out to be not so, would it not be too late? 

Taken at the very end, a single test to measure the years of living and then finding that it did not quite work as we expected would be such a waste of time and effort.

Would it not be advisable to test the framework of living we have along the way before we are asked to walk on the coals?

Is such an assessment possible? Perhaps, there is a way.

 

Come to think of it, the basic unit of life is a day. A day adds to a week, a week to month, a month to a year, and before we know it, we have our life laid out in front of us. 

If life is made up of days, and if days themselves are well lived, the entirety of life would also be well lived. The assertion may sound like bordering on trivial but is important to recognize and hold on to.

Instead of assessing if the framework of living we chose is likely to result in a life well lived, we could assess if following its guidance made our days well lived. For the latter, we get lots more opportunities, and if something is not working, we have an opportunity to either fine tune or try another framework for living. 

The bottom line is, if we take care of individual days, in the end, they will take care of life.

And so, to figure out the framework for living that will make us say that our life was well lived, a good assessment for the viability of the framework would be to assess if it makes us feel if our days are well lived.

Today when we took another walk in the woods I wondered if trees are aware of the cycle of birth and death and also think about the meaning and purpose of their existence. Or perhaps, all wisdom that is needed to have a life well lived is second nature to them. It is only us who have to figure it out.

Ciao.

Summary

1. While confronted with mortality, we need a framework for living so that when nearing the end of our life, we can say that our life was well lived. 

2. To be able to do that, we need a framework for living to guide us.

3. Having decided on a framework for living, we need to ensure it would bring the desired goal. To do that, we need to give it a test drive before we reach the end.

4. A good way to test drive our framework of living to see if following it makes our day well lived.

5. If we take care of individual days, in the end, they will take care of life.

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