Living-Do Something Everyday

 

“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 (Valvano 2013)

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. ,  (Seneca 1997)

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.

Nkosi Johnson

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." In On the Shortness of Life, Life is Long if you Know How to Use it, by Lucius Annaeus Seneca, 1-33. New York: Penguin Books-Great Ideas Series, 1997.

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).

 

 

Dear Marty

 Dear Marty,

We just got the text from Robin telling us about the health challenges that you are facing. A gamut of emotions washed over me in just a few moments: surprise, shock, disbelief, sadness, defiance, and empathy. It all culminated in a great sense of having left a responsibility unfulfilled, a huge sense of failure. I am writing this letter to you in hopes of fulfilling that responsibility. The responsibility is that of us never having taken an account of our long friendship. The thing is, we have a friendship that defies description, our relationship has never been one that requires us to constantly remind each other. Part of it is because we are men and men are not expected to do that kind of thing, part of it is due to our being Midwesterners Given this shot across our bow, I feel like I needed to reach out to you to talk about our friendship. I admit that this is as much about me as it is about you, so please forgive my moment of selfishness.

I just did the math and we have been friends for over forty years. Starting in that Fall of 1979 at Allen Hall, University of Illinois. Both of us freshmen, both of us lost in a massive scrum of other freshman, all looking for certainty, friends, security, and maybe someone who could get us a six pack.  We couldn’t be more different: you are Catholic, I was agnostic at the time, too insecure to admit that I was actually an atheist; you are from the Chicago suburbs, I can from the suburbs of Denver and many other stops along the way; you are one of many siblings in a massive Irish family, I am the only child of a Chinese nuclear family; you majored in business, I majored in electrical engineering; you are the loud and boisterous life of the party extrovert, I am the quiet and shy introvert who couldn’t hold up my end of the small talk if my life depended on it. Yet we bonded over the small things that all 18-year old’s bond over: beer, girls, and the new adventures that awaits us.

We weren’t alone, that little group of ours have been intact for over forty years as well, through the thick and the thin, the steady flow of time washing over us has not eroded our bonds; indeed, it has strengthened our friendship because we all know each other so well, and the initial teenage posturing have given way to the stolid steadiness of late middle age. That was a kind of a nice way to say that we are as old as F___.  I have been told that it is unusual for college friends to still share that bond over that many years. I am not sure of that assertion, but I know that this is the group that brings me comfort and most importantly, gives me the feeling of amity and friendship. We didn’t have any long-range plans to be friends for this long. It happened. I am thankful for that, but I couldn’t tell you just how we were able to hang on to each other for this long.

How we did this was through the weddings, the small meetups in Chicago and elsewhere. You and Robin introduced me to the town of Evansville. Some of the group coming to watch me coach when I was in Chicago; that took real friendship, watching their fat unathletic friend trying to get teenagers to play. I distinctly remember you bringing Chris, Liz, and Matthew to a nondescript warehouse facility to see me and my team. I also remember you and Robin driving from Greyslake to Milwaukee to have breakfast after the end of a technical conference. It was all natural, unexaggerated, and unplanned. I remember the larger group outings to Champaign-Urbana to watch the Illini get their butts handed to them in football, yet not really noticing anything else going on in the stadium because we were together we pretended we were eighteen and carefree once again. I remember my Thanksgiving during my freshman year, which I spent with Scot and his family. We then went over to see you at your house, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life”, That was my first exposure to that magic, thanks to you. If there is a movie that epitomizes the spirit of Marty, that must be it: hopeful, romantic, and of course, finishing with a  happy ending. It is no wonder that this is your favorite movie.

Of course, whenever we got together, it was story telling time, and you had always been the master at that. The stories never got old, although the details become much more exaggerated, because at our age our memories tend to add that little jolt of color. Our laughter and joy were accompanied by the indulgent smiles from the spouses and the incessant eyerolls of the children. They knew the stories forwards, backwards, and sideways: the raid on LAR; the salt in the Sprite; the time you ran away from the dorm to go study, mumbling all the while about something unprintable; the infamous shower party; the band is famous, they play at Mabel’s; the all nighter in the lounge to help you write your masterpiece on the Wizard of Oz and William Jennings Bryant, all six typewriters working in unison as you wrote and edited; and the final time you turned in a U of I assignment, sprinting across the quad to meet the five o’clock deadline, all the time screaming: Save a beer for me, I’ll be right back!

Even though the number of visits became fewer as the years rolled on, we still managed. In this year of COVID we got back together, using the technology of 2020 and the thanks to the genius of Liz: the Zoom cocktail hour. In this time of isolation, we managed to “see” each other every month. I don’t know how everyone else in the group felt, but it saved my soul and healed my mind. Seeing and talking with people who had known me for over forty years made me hopeful again, it made me eighteen again, except for the parts of me that hurt. It means the world to me.

The reason I bring up these things is that I want you to hear them again, I want the past to remind you of who we were and most importantly, I want the memories and stories to lift you up as you fight, like a true Reynold, like you had never had fought before. We can’t be there with you to cheer you on but know that forty years of us is there in spirit.

As I had said previously, we don’t say anything to each other about each other or what everyone means to everyone, but this time is an exception. So here goes.

I love you and I love our group. Fight hard, heal well, and we will see each other again, in person or on Zoom, I don’t care, just so we can be together again.

Pete