Sunday is a good day to write about slowing down time. The day of the week when people traditionally take time from work to relax and recreate, cook a nice breakfast, take a walk, go to church, watch a football game, read the paper.
While we are engaged in scheduled work the thought of free time sounds great. Every Sunday night the thought of just one more day off sounds wonderful to a lot of us.
Or for that matter how great it would be if every day were Saturday.
We know at our core that is not what we really want.
A continuous expanse of time with nothing to do would not be heaven so much as hell.
We could check that theory with a prisoner. Free time doesn’t equate to having nothing to do. Free time is time available to do the things we want to do. Hopefully we spend the vast majority of our time doing what we want to do…which means we already have a bunch of free time. If not, we might want to change jobs to find work we like, switch off our cell phones, take a news break or change our physical or mental scenery (by going outside or reading something we normally would not).
People who reach retirement can be surprised, and disappointed, when the great expanse of free time they find themselves with, which seemed so appealing when they were working, turns out to be a prison.
The idea of alternating days of work with day(s) of rest is important to us in marking time, or perhaps a better way to put it, as a way to tether memories.
If every day is the same we lose our markers and hence our ability to find order and meaning.
We need the alternating rhythm of work/play to appreciate either one. We need contrast to find meaning - ups and downs, good and evil, happiness and sadness, peace and war, contentment and pain, light and dark, order and disorder all help us appreciate and learn about life in our never ending goal of finding what each of us defines as the “good life”.
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“When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one….Habituation is a falling asleep or fatiguing of the sense of time; which explains why young years pass slowly, while later life flings itself faster and faster upon it’s course. We are aware that the interspersing of periods of change and novelty is the only means by which we can refresh our sense of time, strengthen, retard, and rejuvenate it, and therewith renew our perception of life itself. Such is the purpose of our changes of air and scene;…it is the secret of the healing power of change and incident.”
Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain
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Learning to alternate doing with being is an important lesson.
In the world of work people define themselves by what they do, in the whole wide world who you are (being) shapes your experience of life.
At work, and for some of us away from work, we define ourselves by a job description; fireman, taxi driver, administrative assistant, editor, teacher, farmer, social worker, nurse etc.
Outside the sphere of work when interacting with human beings, or alone, it really doesn't matter what you do for a living, but who you are.
People who find themselves with unlimited amounts of personal time can be perfectly happy, depending on how they spent their time prior to retirement, illness, or unemployment.
There are people who never stop what they are doing and wouldn’t want to. They never separated work from life. I tend to think those people never thought of work as a job. There is a distinction between a job with extrinsic rewards (something you do to get money to do something else) and work with intrinsic rewards (something you would do because you love it and if it pays, that’s great too).
For those people who don’t stop what they are doing ever…what they were doing was something like play, or a game, a creative endeavor of some sort, but not what we might consider a job and certainly not dragged down by the drudgery or monotony associated with some jobs.
If we don’t consider the lucky folks who have meaningful work that lasts a lifetime, it can be devastating for some of us to lose that center, whether it be an away from home job or a role as caregiver/life-sharer inside the home. We all know people who died, or made a sharp down turn, not too long after retirement or losing a loved one that centered their life.
People who find themselves with unlimited amounts of free time, tell stories of making vain attempts to order their days by waiting for the mail, meals or a visit from a friend or relative.
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The best way to live is to prepare to die.
Think of your own eulogy and how you wish to be remembered by our family and friends. What are the top 3 things? Perhaps being a good; mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son, friend, sharing your dreams with someone(s), realizing your potential, having courage and compassion, helping people find humor are near the top. These are things that last, things you will take home with you.
It’s not that the lasting things in life are necessarily mutually exclusive with being good at, and dedicated to transitory things, such as a job or work….but if we aren’t self-aware we may find ourselves trying to balance deficiencies in our personal life by overcompensating on the transitory things. Balancing work, life, social, emotional, mind, body, spirit is a great goal but I’ve never been able to achieve it. It’s more of an ongoing journey than and end. You don’t want to devote your whole life climbing the ladder to your dreams (success) only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall, as they say.
We will all, unless we die accidentally, reach a time in our life when we can no longer "do" but will have to be content with "being". Very hard, particularly when that being also includes being taken care of.
We need to find a way to order, and more importantly find meaning, in our life outside of the workweek.
Helping/caring for people or animals, gardening/growing, individual games or with others, writing, knitting, quilting, painting, making music, scrap booking, letter writing, emailing, story telling, joke sharing or any number of activities provide some greater or lesser degree of order and meaning.
It's important to choose some things that provide both order and meaning since we could find a perfectly ordered and perfectly meaningless life if we weren't careful e.g. I watch the Today Show at 9, Days of Our Lives at 10, One Life to Live at 11,etc.
We need the chaos of nature, of life, not only to keep things interesting (show me a clean house and I’ll show you a boring person as Erma Bombeck said), but to give us an opportunity to evolve emotionally, spiritually and philosophically. We can pick and choose out of that chaos those things that help us define the meaning of a good life.
All these things serve as a prelude and a transition to the end of life. Enjoy them while you can and hopefully they will lead you to a calm quiet center that will serve you well when the time comes that you can no longer do some or all of them.
The hardest, and therefore probably the most important thing of all, is to appreciate (dare I say love) your self.
This will help you separate who you are from what you do for a living and when the time comes, allow you to accept help from others. Again very hard..but you deserve it, and it's a compassionate thing to do not just for yourself but for those who will find meaning in their own lives by helping you.
