“What have you got planned for the weekend?”
This coffee point question is always a bit of a teaser. It’s often bookended with deep sighs and then vague comments about having a drink or two to decompress after a heavy week of work. Then a lament about how there’s not really enough hours of the day. The bane of modern life.
And of Greek philosophers too. I’m quite a fan of Seneca (the noted stoic and contemporary of Jesus, to give you an idea of when he was writing) and would heartily recommend that you give him a Google (and, thus inspired, have a go at reading one of his surprisingly pithy tracts on philosophy).
A good starting point is ‘On the shortness of life’ in which he laments at how the speed of life these days means that people don’t have time to live. He talks about how everyone is rushing about between villages on horses, depriving themselves of the time to contemplate that came from walking from place to place by foot. Back in the good old days. As he’s philosophising, that’s not his end point, that’s where he starts. His actual point is that we should live each day as though it’s our last. That it’s weird how we can jealously guard our personal possessions but that we can be happy to waste our time as though we were immortal*.
There’s an exercise, which I’ve never undertaken myself, probably out of fear, in which you look to get a grip on your priorities by picking a likely age that you’re going to live until, then take away the age you currently are. Then convert that into days or hours. Then subtract the amount of time that you’ll be asleep, or eating, or commuting, or on the lavatory… Basically, the idea is that you mine down until you get a clear idea of how much time you’ve actually got left, just for yourself. This is intended to prompt you into making the most of that time and not frittering it away doomscrolling or watching cat videos on your phone. The friends and acquaintances I know who’ve tried it have often looked at the number and felt it seemed bigger than they expected (not sure they should have turned it into seconds), and so filled their boots with cat videos etc etc.
From the non-judgemental aspect of coaching, so long as that’s what you’re wanting to do, that’s absolutely fine. We all do need to decompress and we all have our own methods of stilling our mind from the bustle of pondering the day that’s gone or worrying about the stuff that’s coming up. Seneca himself was really trying to highlight the importance of building in time for leisure – “There is nothing the busy man is less busied with than living.”
A really regular topic that comes up in coaching is about carving out the time for a better work/life balance. There’s lots of discussion about the power of saying no, and it is true that if we cut out all the bits of time that we spend on things that don’t improve our lives, then we do expand the amount of time available to us to do the stuff that we value (which will differ from person to person).
If coaching has shown me anything, it’s that humanity has really eclectic tastes, but that time spent on things you really enjoy or will gain enjoyment from, is time well used. So rather than taking up brainspace wishing for more time, how much better to take stock and suss out what is really working for you? To quote another Greek philosopher (Socrates – via Plato)
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Although that quote is gleaned from his Apology in which he nobly chooses death over exile, which context somewhat blunts the modern applicability.
Better maybe to follow Epictetus’ Discourses (translated neatly by Robin Hard)
“As the material of the carpenter is wood, and that of the statuary bronze, so the subject matter of the art of living is each person’s own life.”
I like the reference to “each person” in that quote. We all have very different wants and needs and we all take our own paths to get to where we want to be. It’s probably why I enjoy watching the impact of the coaching that I do, seeing people taking a bit of time to examine their life, taking the time to assess what they’re doing and what to tweak, change or retain. To live life a bit more fully and confidently, knowing that they’re not just set on autopilot. As Seneca concluded – life isn’t short.
“Life is long if you know how to use it.”
Which seems a nice way to head into the weekend. Along with being kind to ourselves that we don’t need to fix this overnight, or beat ourselves up about it. The Greek philosophers were fretting and debating this a couple of thousand years ago. It’s still a bone of contention, so maybe there aren’t any easy… or more accurately, any universal answers and the pondering of this is all part of life, and a good way to spend at least some of it.
Have a nice weekend all.
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*Little digression… Aubrey De Grey, biological gerontologist, has suggested that the first humans who could live forever may already have been born, as ageing is a disease that could be cured. We only have to reach a point where our longevity reaches escape velocity and outpaces our ageing. Life expectancy was increasing at around 2 years per decade when he made this suggestion. At some point it could feasibly become one year per year. The thought seems intriguing and possibly terrifying (cf Richard Morgan’s sci-fi gumshoe detective noir novel Altered Carbon).