Our Days, Our Lives

"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives" - Annie Dillard

I was mid coaching session the other day when my (very wise) client uttered Dillard’s quote, and it landed at my feet with the quiet but distinctive thud of an important idea hitting the bottom of your being.

That, I thought to myself, is something you’ll want to look at in your Self, Sidonie. Her words gave me a strange feeling. But it’s not like I thought them untrue. Quite the opposite. I knew what she said was very true. But I also noticed that I stored this knowing in a different part of my brain to where I kept my trusty “you’ll only be a success when” script, and my “tick everything off the to do list and you’ll feel good” script, and my favourite “be better, work harder” script.  I had to keep it separate from those scripts because it had a distinct feeling of awkwardness if I let it get too close. Much like being seated with an ex at a wedding.

So why does the idea that our days equal our lives result in such a peculiarly uncomfortable feeling, or is it just me?

Is it that 24x7 mass-media blasts us with a bazillion dazzling solutions to problems we didn’t know we had and shows us all the lives we could be enjoying, if only we were someone else? Yeah, maybe.

Or is it that in this world of striving, doing, and achieving, the idea of stopping for a moment to take in our surroundings feels counter-intuitive? Almost certainly.

I have lost count of the times I have said “Hang on, I just need to do these things before I’ll have time to “be” /to enjoy/to feel/to experience.”

Our want to do our best with the life we’ve been given has led to us to prioritise striving or pushing-through over presence and awareness, meaning that unless we are very careful, the sum of our life will look like a lot like boxes ticked and not a lot like something worthy.

“Bob was a great man. Always working, even on weekends, paid all his bills on time” said no eulogist ever.

In response to Dillard’s quote, I have started to experiment with how I spend my time and how I work out what matters each day, and I’ll keep you posted. Early results show immediate changes in how I feel in myself and (here’s the kicker) how much I’m getting done (in a good way!).