[Originally published 10 years ago, on December 29, 2011]
Moristotle, you recently said that you’d be more mindful how you spend your time. Are you spending it better?
If you’d asked me that yesterday, I don’t think I could have answered coherently—and not sure I can yet. Apparently, the challenge to be more mindful went deeper than I realized. It raises lots of difficult questions.
For example?
Well, first, I got off on questions of how humans in general could make better use of their time. Thinking about “obvious truths” such as that people ought to choose to eat healthier foods (when such choices are available to them) made me realize that I have virtually zero influence over other people’s choices. As I said the other day, who’s going to enforce them? And on what basis? Maybe it would be “better” overall for some people to eat as unhealthily as they possibly can—so that they’d die sooner and overpopulated Earth could get on with recycling their bodies.
That sort of thinking would be a distraction.
Indeed. My “new ten commandments” (or Christopher Hitchens’s or George Carlin’s, or anyone else’s—except perhaps God’s, if some new "God" should come along and bring Scripture up-to-date) will make next to no difference whatsoever.
How could an update from “God” be an exception?
Simply that millions of people believe that commandments that enjoy “God’s” endorsement deserve fealty, even when they contradict clearly superior ethical principles.
Ah, so it really comes down to what “better” means? And maybe that comes down to each individual’s having to decide for him or herself—at least in a more or less free society, if not in places like North Korea, where the State decides for you, or in an Islamic theocracy, where the local mullah tells you what to do?
Right. Just yesterday did I finally come around to the realization that perhaps the main way I could spend my time better would be to stop thinking (and writing) about how other people could better spend theirs. They’re going to spend it how they will. Even principles with “God’s” endorsement for how people spend their time won’t cut it with someone who won’t buy into them.
So, what did you do this morning to spend your time better on a strictly personal level?
I took a book to the restroom after breakfast rather than a Sudoku puzzle. Doing Sudokus is absorbing (and may even have health benefits in terms of “sharpening the brain”), but I’m sure I get more out of serious book reading.
As simple as that?
Yes, quite. Simple might be the operative word. Another distraction I was having besides thinking about how people in general could better spend their time was the fact that some questions run so deep they could overturn my life—like, Why not live somewhere else? Why not find new friends? We need to let some things lie. At any rate, we can’t reasonably make huge changes all at once, unless we’re in a very dangerous situation and need to extract ourselves from it at once. Someone I know recently fled a man who had been beating her and she thought might be planning to kill her.
Okay. So, what else did you do this morning?
Well, something I’ve actually been doing for several days—“pencil push-ups” that my neuro-ophthalmologist mentioned again recently for strengthening my eye muscles for reading. (I do thirty reps of following the eraser on a pencil as I move it to and from my eyes.) I’d neglected this exercise of late, but became mindful that perhaps I should be doing them. Also, I stretched before even getting out of bed. I got myself more fully awake before stumbling into the kitchen, if only in order to be more self-aware of what I was doing so that I could do it more efficiently—and maybe even enjoy it more. (I think I did.) And when I was turning on my computer to do my “daily” blog (this is the first one since Sunday), I got out my new cell phone to finish ripping an audiobook to it. And while I was waiting for the computer to be ready to rip, I started updating my contacts...It actually started to seem ridiculous. I was afraid I would forget some of what I wanted to say in this web log.
So, even just “doing the simple things” can get pretty involved?
Indeed! It made me realize that trying to make better use of my time can get me off into yet another distraction—the idea that there’s an absolutely best thing to do, right now. That kind of thinking tends to paralyze me, throw me into confusion.
So, have you found something solid now that you can more or less rely on?
I think so. Actually, it’s something from more than half a lifetime ago, some advice I heard from a traveling lecturer. Simply to pause before responding to stimuli (of my own choosing) in order to think of alternatives and inject a bit of “free choice” as to what my response will be. Stimulus-pause-Response.
Why did you put air quotes around “free will”?
Are you sure your will is actually free?
Ah, right. I see what you mean...Anyway, may we call the pause-before-responding maxim a “new day’s resolution”?
Sure, why not? You know how I dislike holidays.
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