vignettes

The metronome

"Life is long if you know how to use it." —Seneca

I have always held other people's expectations for me a bit suspect.

While I believe that others have the best intentions for me, I think that our hopes and fears for each other are often colored by our hopes and fears for ourselves. This makes the task of finding our own way much more difficult and complex because, in the process of making ourselves happy, we run the risk of making those around us unhappy. Once-beloved relationships become the unintended casualties of our need to find harmony in ourselves.

In writing the soundtrack of our lives, we must decide how fast or how slow we want it to go, when we seek to create harmony, and when we don't, when we borrow influences from others, and when we invent a whole new rhythm or chord. But the one thing we cannot decide is how long it will play.

Time is the only resource in each of our lives that is truly finite, and with each day that passes, we have even less to work with. It quietly slips away, measured by this silent metronome that keeps ticking in the background even while we sleep. And yet we live as though we were unaware.

We spend our time doing things that do not make us happy and we don't make enough time to embrace the things that do. Until something happens that startles us awake—a tragedy of our own, or a tragedy of someone else's—that restores our sense of urgency to do the things that make this life worth living, and make us worth remembering.

Where is the music in your life?

 

The missing peace

"It was missing a piece, and it was not happy. So it set off in search of its missing piece."*

I love the Stoics. Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius. I like to think of them as the "Buddhists of the West."

I stumbled upon them by accident, and found in them something that had been missing for me: a philosophy about personal happiness. It was simple, pure, complete. But most importantly, it was accessible. Because these were real people who lived real lives and toiled with this thing we are all navigating, celebrating, suffering to the best of our individual ability—the Human Journey.

I sometimes wonder what the world would be like if we each became more accountable for our own happiness.

Instead of blaming each other for not being better parents, lovers, siblings, or friends, we would be more accepting of everyone for who they are and what they bring, celebrating what is and letting go of what is not.

Instead of measuring the value of our lives in terms of milestones and material things, comparing our lot to the lots of others, we would be grateful for what we have and stop romanticizing what we don't.

Instead of reliving the past or fixating on the future, we would accept that wherever we are in this moment now, it is the result of choices we made to craft this life and no other. That this one life is the reward. And every opportunity—good or bad—gives us a chance to learn and grow and give back to the world around us.

If we did these three things, it would mean that we would no longer look to the outside world for answers to the question of what makes us happy. Instead, we would turn our attention inward and look no further than ourselves.

Where do you find your peace?

*The Missing Piece, Shel Silverstein