“To me, there are three things
we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number
one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend
some time in thought. Number three is, you should have your emotions moved to
tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think,
and you cry, that’s a full day. That’s a heck of a day. You do that seven days
a week, you’re going to have something special.” Jim Valvano
Jim Valvano, in his now famous speech at the 1993 ESPY’s
encouraged everyone to do three things every day: laugh, think, be moved to
tears. The idea is that if you did these three things every day, you have lived
a full day. This was a speech given when Coach Valvano knew he had very little time
left on this earth.
While I agree with Coach Valvano, I also think that we can
do more in the time that we do have on
earth, because we would be remiss if we did not strive to be more ambitious,
more greedy with what we desire in our time on earth.
The Stoic philosopher Seneca takes a different viewpoint. On the Shortness of Life, Seneca reproaches his friend Paulinus for
grieving over the shortness of life,
The majority of mortals,
Paulinus, complain bitterly of the spitefulness of Nature, because we are born
for a brief span of life, because even this space that has been granted to us
rushes by so speedily and so swiftly that all save a very few find life at an
end just when they are getting ready to live. Nor is it merely the common herd
and the unthinking crowd that bemoan what is, as men deem it, an universal ill;
the same feeling has called forth complaint also from men who were famous...It
is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life
is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow
the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well
invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is
devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive
that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the
life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it,
but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a
moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however
limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life
is amply long for him who orders it properly. ,
The difference between the two thought pivots on one point:
Coach Valvano’s advice was his last word for those us who are left after his
passing, a bit of wisdom from someone who has learned the value of life and who
is resolved to his fate. It is a last exhortation to live life as he would have
liked to continue to live.
Seneca’s view is in reaction to those who have been slothful
and wasteful with the lives that have been given. He is disappointed, if not
outright disgusted, with the way we humans are wasting the life that we are
given.
Most of us, and I am among the worst offenders, live our
lives as though we had infinite time to do infinite things. This blind belief
in our immortality starts when we are young, based on youthful hubris when we
were on the precipice of adulthood, fueled by confirmation and optimism biases.
We carry that belief in our immortality into our middle and, to a large extent,
into our old age. It isn’t until the finality of our very definite mortality
has made abundantly clear that we begin
to regret our wasted lives. There is a refrain that is often recited derisively
by the old in admonishing the young: you are wasting your life; you need to do
more with your life. The dominant interpretation of “not wasting your time on
earth” is usually skewed to the puritan work ethic that has been ingrained in
every cell of our being since time immemorial. We are led to believe that living
a productive, high achieving, and hard-working life; while contributing to the
economy and society is the only definition for having lived a worthy life. This
is definitely not my view. I am not of the opinion that we should all just stop
working, that being productive, high achieving, and hard-working are
undesirable; I believe that while they are important, they are not the sole defining
qualifications for having lived a worthy life.
There are many facets to our lives, it is up to us to
Do all you can with what you have in the time you
have in the place you are.
It
is our actions in meeting the idea which is encapsulated in the previous quote
that assures us of lengthening the time that we have to live:
- doing what we can
- with what we have
- in the time that we have
- in the place that we are.
I have been thinking about this topic for a while as I was
going through a mid-life crisis and looking backwards at my past and the roads
not taken, then I started to deliberately explore myself, I started to look at the
me that occupies my mind when I am not occupied with paying my bills. I will
grant that this is a luxury that most of us can ill afford, but it is what kept
me sane in my time treading water in the corporate miasma. In diving deeply into this thought, I started
feeling pangs of regret: for making the
conscious decision to concentrate on the rational and certain parts of myself while
also making the conscious decision to neglect
the sentient and amorphous parts of myself because that is what I was expected
to do, as a productive member of the society, contributing to the burgeoning economy.
As with most humans, uncertainties bothered me, so I chose
to ignore uncertainty and embraced the deterministic and predictable. I ignored
the uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable; and in so doing
I failed to leave room for grace, for beauty, for serendipity, for the unknown,
and for the irrational real.
As I have come to the middle of my life, I appreciate the
uncertain, the random, the unmeasurable and the unknowable. I did not realize
that grace, beauty, serendipity, the unknown, and the irrational real is such an essential part of my life. Indeed,
I was mentally, intellectually, and emotionally skewed for a long time without
realizing it. This was the key revelation which helped make me whole; I am now
ready to make up for lost time.
I started the list as a way to feed my need for order in my
life. I have planned, kept journals, and tried uncountably many different
methods of organizing myself. I have always failed because I have never made it
a habit to be organized. As a lifelong perfectionist, I have always put off executing
my organizing because the conditions were never perfect, I always felt that I
needed to wait to pull the trigger because I can always make the conditions
better so that my execution of my organizational plan will be perfect; it was
the act of a mad man, I was foolish, delusional, and definitely self-deceptive.
My response to this failure to execute is to self-flagellate, bringing all the
years of Asian guilt that had accrued in my psyche to bear on myself; until one
day I came to the realization that Life is not a Game of Perfect, that instead
of punishing myself, I needed to take care of myself, my whole and undivided self.
This is when this list germinated.
I have tried to implement this list for the past year, I have
found it difficult to execute consistently, yet I have found pleasure in
meeting its challenges mainly because the ideas are so abstract and it takes a
bit of imagination to actually accomplish. I have not quit even though I have
yet to accomplish the list completely in one day, but I have had a very nice
journey, I have enjoyed the process; which indirectly became a valuable part of
the lesson: it is in the perseverance that the process becomes well hewn. I
have not had a desire to not complete the list every day because I believe in
this list. People like measurable results because they are tangible and obvious,
while the immeasurability of the process is intangible and abstract. The magic
happens in the confluence between the measurable and the immeasurable , the tangible
and the intangible, the obvious and the abstract. It is not about seeing my
choices as a dichotomy, that is a human construct; it isn’t about the either/or;
it is about the alchemy which blends both; it is about the greater whole, the yin
and yang as two halves of the whole circle.
Here is the list. I will explain each bullet later. I have
had some excellent days engaging in the serendipitous process of doing while also
reveling in the amorphous and ambiguous.
Note that this is not a definitive list, it is my list, it
serves me. As with all things that I have done or are doing, I reserve the
right to change my mind, this is a capture of this moment in time which is
reflective of me.
I try to do all these things in a day; but more importantly,
I also try to do it as a natural part of the ebb and flow of the daily rhythm.
I do this without calling for notice or recognition, i.e. do it without an ego.
Finally, I do this while in wu-wei, that is: I try not to try.
Things to do Every Day*
- Learn
something new
- Teach
something
- Experience
something beautiful
- Be
inspired by something wise and profound
- Allow
something to move you to tears
- Do
something unfamiliar
- Do
something uncomfortable
- Do
something that makes you feel vulnerable
- Do
something kind and generous
- Love
someone unconditionally
*In reviewing my list against
Coach Valvano’s list, I can safely say that I embraced the spirit of his three
things, except I am much more pedantic and nitpicky, but that is my nature.
Works Cited
Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. "On the Shortness of
Life."
Valvano, Jim. "Jim Valvano's ESPYs Speech
Transcript: Full Text." MyTownTutors. March 28, 2013.
https://www.mytowntutors.com/jim-valvanos-espys-speech-transcript-full-text/
(accessed November 25, 2020).
