What if EVERY day is your Big Day?
On April 8, 1854, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a letter to his daughter with a little life advice:
“Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is another day; you shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
A lot of wisdom there. And a lot of semicolons. (Also: “cumbered”!)
We’re cumbered by the goofs and gaffes we commit, unless we voluntarily pledge to be un-encumbered by them as sleep wipes the day clean. There’s something freeing about living that way. You’re less likely to be playing defense all the time, fearing that if something goes sideways today you’re gonna have to wear it tomorrow. You can just fly at things, trusting that the good you do will outweigh the harm.
There is a Zen Buddhist meditation practice of pretending each day is your whole life.
With the sunrise, you are born. Whoa. Amazing. This is all new. Lap it up.
By afternoon you’re starting to feel like you’re ripening. You’re learning things, feeling things more deeply, connecting dots, having adventures, making friends.
By evening your accumulated wisdom settles on you like a weighted blanket.
And then it’s done. You’re done. Tomorrow is as yet unborn.
Thich Nhat Hanh called this cultivating a “day tight” mindset. “I promise myself I will enjoy every minute of the day that has been given to me,” Hahn said.
Keeping our own impermanence top of mind is a useful frame for the day. A certain generosity of spirit naturally emerges. You can’t stay upset at anyone: whatever happened between you, let’s face it, doesn’t matter.
The anthropologist Ernest Becker had a slightly different take on the human adventure with memento mori. If we were being totally honest, he said, what we’d write in our diary every morning would be:
What distraction from mortality am I going to get up to today?
It’s our terror of dying that spurs us to do pretty much everything we do, Becker believed. Our anxiety has to go somewhere. So we divert it.
Some diversions are more meaningful than others. We might try to create something that will outlive us: a work of art, a business, a human relationship. Futzing time away mindlessly is hard to justify if we really did believe, in our bones, that this chunk of daylight is all we were ever going to get.
The way to figure out what you truly value, Becker said, is for you to take on the following task: Ask yourself, If I could actually grasp that I will die and be forgotten, what would remain meaningful for me? (It might be a what, or it might be a who.)
This is your immortality project.
Not long ago our family was sitting around the breakfast table, and a thought occurred to me: a dear friend, one hundred years old and suffering from cancer, had chosen MAID – medically assisted death. Today was the day. I thought: Sonia has seen her last sunset. She has drunk her last cup of tea.
We’d said our goodbyes earlier in the week. At one point the conversation touched on her beliefs. Sonia was not a religious person. She imagined that what would happen, as her children surrounded her, and laid a hand gently on a knee or a shoulder, and the physician produced a syringe and touched the needle to her skin, was that the world would go out like a light, and that would be it. This was not troubling to her; she felt she’d been dealt more than her share of love and adventure.
“When I was younger,” our teenage daughter chimed in, “I used to imagine I’d been waiting hundreds of thousands of years to be born, and now here.” She is a mythology enthusiast (to the point that, I would say, mythology is her faith). “That’s the way the ancient Egyptians thought of it. You went to Hades. It wasn’t a fiery pit but a waiting room. You waited to move on. But you never moved on. Then Persephone went to Hades and she cleaned things up in there. Now there was a new deal. You could, under the right circumstances, go back to earth, reborn into a new body. So that’s what I assumed had happened to me.”
She felt that as a heavy responsibility to carry. “So I vowed to really tune into my life, the gift of it.”
It’s an artful way to live, I think, treating each day as the whole ball of wax.
The poet Eula Bliss says we can live large lives by living very small ones, “inside the pit of the peach.” It feels expansive but also precarious. You’re flying on instruments, “not knowing where you’re going, getting carried across the ocean by birds.”
photo: Mark Stosberg / Unsplash
