Filling the time

Saturday, January 6, 2024, 3 p.m. Well, my friends, I hear you knocking at the door. Have heard you since this morning. What’s on your mind?

Consistency. Constancy. Reliability. Inertia in the productive sense of the word. Purpose. Filling of the time in the way best for you – with the usual caveat, “Which you?”

I’m listening.

What does one do with life in the absence of external constraints and external prodding? This is an important question that will shed light on how to employ constraints and proddings to best effect.

“No rest for the weary?” Or is it, “for the wicked?”

Rust is not rest. If you are idle and are content to be idle, where is the problem? But if you are idle and you feel it as waste, that’s another story.

Or if, like Rita in her eighties, you are still here but don’t know why, living without any great urge to do something, but somewhat bored.

Exactly so. UVA’s Alderman Library is about to reopen and you are feeling the urge to read everything in there, and at the same time you are feeling the discontent that goes with lack of direction.

Not just me. Charles, the same thing. He’s even tired of reading. But (although he isn’t shy about proposing projects for me to do!), one can’t just pluck a meaningful project off a bush, plus I have a strong feeling that perhaps the nature of the projects ought to change. It isn’t like I have to keep writing books or even blog posts, or even conversations with you. But a new direction is not obvious. Of course this involves getting back up to speed. I had hoped I was going to be out of this long lifetime by now, and here I am in 2024, for God knows how much longer.

We recognize that this isn’t quite a complaint.

No, but, like Rita, there is a certain amount of puzzlement. Plus, do I really want to start something new I cannot necessarily finish?

That may be said by anyone at any age.

Oh I know. But it’s perhaps more appropriate at 77 than at, say, 47, or 27, much less 17.

We return to the questions: Which you? The 3D ego self is at its best responding to the moment. It is not necessarily the best judge of direction or motion or velocity. You choose, but you don’t foresee the results of your choices (and there’s nothing wrong with that); another level of you keeps you on course, if you let it do so.

Well, I don’t know anything to do beyond being receptive to what comes. Lord knows, I don’t steer the ship.

You do steer the ship, moment by moment. You mean to say, you don’t set the course.

All right, I see that.

So if a wider, longer, older, wiser part of you sets the course, and you faithfully steer, where is the problem?

Slowing way down, I get that there isn’t a problem, so long as we steer faithfully and continuously choose according to our values (even if these values change as we go). We will move smoothly.

You will imperceptibly align yourselves moment by moment, which reduces friction and smooths progress.

In short, don’t sweat over the question of where we’re headed or how to get there.

Let’s say, live in confidence that doing your best moment by moment is the very thing needed.

No grand Five Year Plans.

Make your five-year plan if you wish. Make a 50-year plan, if you wish. You are free to choose what you prefer. Only, remember, you live moment by moment, and there’s nothing wrong with being unable to see very far ahead.

As [Joshua Lawrence] Chamberlain said, we don’t see far ahead, so it’s best to form habits that will carry us in future unpredicted situations.

This is just common sense, surely.

So if I’m hearing you right, you are saying that consistently living our values is, in a sense, all the planning we need to do.

It is all the execution you need to do. Live your life one moment at a time – as if you have any alternate way you can live! – and you don’t have anything worth worrying about.

Thanks as usual. A short session, but better than nothing, I suppose.