It is the early hours of the morning. It is the beginning of my day.
These are the moments for my first cup of Earl Gray on a winter morning while it is still dark outside. We are in the midst of the winter and still a few months away before the spring would be here to bring a respite from six long months of introspection that winters can be good for. But still, after a while the novelty wears off.
To be free of the progression of winter dictated by the movement of celestial bodies, we can either wait for spring to arrive, or pack our bags, go to some place where summer rules, and take what already seems like a much needed break from cold and its regime of clothes.
It would be just like we did a couple of years ago when in the month of February we boarded the plane for St. Croix during the height of Covid, and a few hours later, were transported to the soothing embrace of tropical winds. Just outside the airport, we were greeted by the sense of freedom. And also, the sight of roosters running around.
The west side of St. Croix, where we stayed, was a wonderful place to be. In the night one can sit on the deck of the house we had rented and look at the night sky. With no city lights to pollute, one can see the sprinkling of millions of stars. Those nights brought home the realization of the spaciousness of time and space we live in.
Me, merely a speck in space, a blip in time compared to what all is out there.
Sitting outside on the deck in the quietness of the night that was occasionally pierced by the sounds of gecko dreaming, made me realize that I have a close connection to those distant stars. For starters, we both are made of the same atoms. Those stars burn the atoms as fuel in their bellies to sustain atoms that make my body.
Death of those stars is also the very reason that I exist. Without their alchemy of fusing hydrogen atoms to make heavier elements, I would not exist.
It is true that at a fundamental level we all are connected.
We are all made of atoms, and at the level of microcosm, we all share the same origin. At the macro level, however, we seem to be made of different things.
When I look in the mirror, what I see is hairs, eyes, a nose, two limbs. The car I drive has wheels, wiper blades, windshield glass, and tail lights. The laptop I am writing on has a screen, a keyboard, a wireless mouse that scurries on the table.
Then there is the realm of time one can think about. At the microcosm level there is the ticking of clocks which becomes the passage of days, months, years, and eventually, our entire life.
At the macrocosm level the passage of time can also be made of different components that sometimes we refer to as stages.
If I were to play my life from the past to the present in fast motion, I would see discrete stages along the journey - years of childhood; years of going to school and beginnings of education, followed by leaving home and going to college; years that made up my career and family.
In my mind's eye, I can also imagine the same movie playing forward and there will be stages of retirement life made up of traveling years, followed by years of being homebound, and then finally, a day when the bulb flickers and goes out.
The life of the universe also has different epochs along its evolution - quantum fluctuations, the Bing Bang, inflation, dark ages, and so on.
But much closer to home, one can also consider what makes up a day.
A day is made up of hours between when we get out of the bed, and in the evening, return to it - a span of 16-17 hours. That span of time is made of different components - the morning hours of taking it slow and spent in savoring a couple of cups of soothing aroma of Earl Gray; the time between breakfast and the lunch followed by, perhaps, a siesta; the evening hours of twilight and listening to the birds returning to their nest.
Or if I were back in India, taking in the smells of preparing the dinner that wafted in the air - the frying of herbs, browning the mix of fresh ginger, onions, tomatoes, and garlic. Just writing about them makes me feel so nostalgic.
Using an alternate scheme, a day can be broken down along the bins of its engagements. In one bin falls our discretionary engagements; in the other bin are the non-discretionary engagements for which we make choices for.
The discretionary engagements are needed to keep our cells humming - cooking, exercising, paying bills. Non-discretionary engagements are hobbies, feeding our growth mindset, developing and maintaining social connections.
And so, what makes up a day is its engagements. And by making appropriate choices for what engagements we carry in the non-discretionary bin, we hold the power to determine if the day is going to be well lived or not.
Well for now, I need to head to the basement. It is my time to engage in my daily exercise. After doing it for more than 30-years, it now falls in my discretionary bin of engagements during the day.
Engagements, when they become a habit, can defect from one bin to another.
Ciao
Summary:
1. A day is made up of its engagements.
2. The engagements during the day can be put into two bins.
3. The two bins of engagements are - discretionary and non-discretionary.
4. By making appropriate choices for what engagements we carry in the non-discretionary bin, we hold the power to determine if the day is going to be 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
Building a framework for living #7: The yardstick for fulfilling days
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