More Time for Living

To a good degree, Lent reminds us of the limitedness of human lifetime, of our own mortality. I see young people dying, quite often; many of them not other people to me, but either dear friends or family. When other people die, it’s easy to take it as a fact of earthly life and we go on living as usual. When loved ones die, a part of us dies with them.

Given the number of friends and relatives I’ve lost through the years, it’s like a good part of me is already gone. I mourn each passing of a dear one. Some people tell me mourning is good for emotional healing. It’s easy for them to put it lightly like that, when it’s not one of theirs that death takes away. I mourn not because I want to heal. I mourn because part of my being is rendered empty.

In the light of the great advances of modern medicine and the present health care system, many of us will probably live for more than 80 years – that is if we’re either averagely moneyed or careful. But let’s say we have just 80 years. That’s 29,220 days in all. If we each had a chart posted somewhere at home reflecting each one of those days, and we were to cross off every passing day, that should remind us always to live our days fully.

I often think that we should get as much living into our lives as possible. The good majority of us live only at half speed, and we lose away a lot of living that way. We go easy with our time, don’t bother to have a plan, and thus don’t accomplish much on any of our days.

Maybe science could help us here. There are a lot of things in life that just take too long. Sleeping is one. We’ve been taught that we should sleep for a full eight hours a day. Some people sleep even longer. That’s a good chunk of precious lifetime wasted.

Maybe our scientists could develop something to make us sleep faster so we’d spend less time doing nothing. They’ve compounded all these mind-bending drugs that do nothing but get the young among us in trouble. Perhaps there’s something they can make that would give us the worth of a whole night’s sleep in just two hours.

I think two hours should be the shortest we should go on sleep. I wouldn’t want my sleep time to be any shorter than that. I like the whole business of getting ready to go to bed and lying there thinking for a little while before I finally doze off. It’s a very satisfying process; little pleasures like that can really make anyone’s life full.

If I could get all the health benefits of a whole night’s sleep in two hours, I could wake up refreshed and then get back to all the wonderful things I like to do that I can only do when I’m awake.

There are other things that eat up a lot of time, too. I’d like to be able to get some physical exercise faster every day. I brisk-walk twice or thrice a week, but exercise is incidental to the fun of walking. There’s nothing like going out with a friend very early morning and meeting other walkers. I don’t want to cut down on the one hour and a half that brisk-walking takes with me. But, on the days when I don’t walk, I want to give my body a complete exercise in about ten minutes.

Phone calls, especially on a landline, take so much time. This, for sure, is something we can all do something about. It usually takes too long to get to the point of a phone call and too long to finally end it. Maybe I’d ask Ma’am Ginnie Vamenta to rewrite the phone etiquette and eliminate all the cliché, unnecessary pleasantries that don’t mean anything to anyone anymore, anyway. We could each save a week or so a year by shortening our phone calls.

However, there are some things that take a lot of time that might seem like a waste but are actually not. Sitting and staring, for instance, are not wasting time. These things feel good to do. And you can’t speed up staring, especially if your sight is fixed on a thing of beauty. I wouldn’t want to hurry up on it even if I could.

Sitting alone musing on something profound is not wasting time. Especially when we are trying to fathom essential mysteries, of our world and of our own selves. We should, in fact, regularly spend time to direct our thoughts beyond physical sensations, and into dimensions yet unknown. We may never attain full comprehension of the true nature and purpose of our earthly experience; but, at least, we shall probably learn some ideas to make our short stopover on this planet a little bit more directed.

So why hurry up on living, anyway? Why stuff our lives with activities, most of which don’t serve any purpose other than make us look busy and give us some social status? Shouldn’t we just relish each day by enjoying each moment, including enjoying a long nourishing sleep or a wandering yet warm talk on the phone with a friend? 

We don’t need science to quicken the things we enjoy doing. Perhaps we don’t need supersonic trains to blur our view of the exhilarating vistas when visiting new places. We don’t need communication gadgets that render personal interaction obsolete. We need more time for living, for the time-consuming human living.

I know of a man who once lost a baby boy in a fire. At the time of the accident, he was away from home dabbling on several jobs. Perhaps as a coping technique, he consoled himself then with the thought that he was yet at his prime and could still have another child.

He soon had another child. But the death of one child could never be offset by the birth of another. Today, several decades since, the father is still hurting. It’s not that he has not forgotten the past pain, for he has long been over it. But he’d often mention, out of the blue, that he should have had two grown-up kids today instead of only one. Somewhere in his being, the man continues to mourn – because the death of his child has forever cracked his soul.

It’s not certain for how long we must carry the hurts from our past and whether going through them will eventually bring us relief. Beyond today there is tomorrow. And beyond tomorrow there is yet another day. What we can do, perhaps, is make sure that we best use the time we are each given while here, so we may be given a better time in the hereafter.