The Life you choose

Did you choose, today?

Interior with Woman at Piano (1901) – Vilhelm Hammershøi

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

This quote from Annie Dillard reminds me that not all choices about how we allocate our time are equal.

One morning last year I decided spontaneously upon waking that I would go for a jog for the first time. It was 7AM, February (the midst of winter in SF) and I went outside in long pants and a jacket because the cold was such that it permeated even my dreams.

Once outside, I picked a direction and got going, not knowing where I would stop and turn back, not caring, because I was really running away from something rather than towards anything.

I ended up going all the way to Buena Vista park, climbed the steep trail to the top, and was rewarded unexpectedly, handsomely, with a magical sight—San Francisco, sprawling, languid, in its waking hours, bleary with fog and dew and the crisp morning light.

I got back home by 9AM, and I remember that morning feeling like a personal revelation. The choice to go for a jog that day cost me not 2 hours, but 200, and counting, because from then on it became my morning routine twice a week, every week.

How we spend our days, is, of course, how we spend our lives. Take care in choosing for today, that you might really be choosing for the rest of your life.

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
watch your words, they become your actions;
watch your actions, they become your habits;
watch your habits, they become your character;
watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”
—Lao Tzu

This quote reminds me of routine, and the little choices you make that end up woven into the tapestry of your destiny.

Routine is memory foam that comfortably constricts the shape and movement of our life. Routine is a choice until it isn’t; we choose routine until one day comes and it starts choosing for us.

I feel like we all know routine of action: your morning jogs, your daily coffee, gym twice a week, friends on weekends, and a cheeky outing come Friday nights. But these aren’t the only routines looping endlessly in your life, routine of perception is the more pernicious one that settles in as we sink deeper into our chronic self.

Routine of perception is taking things for granted, like a form of sensory adaptation: your appreciation for things ossifies and the hedonic treadmill continues to drag us along. I call it pernicious because it embezzles from our agency in subtle ways.

Eventually, you find that you’ve handed your life’s "car keys” entirely over to the thing; routine becomes chauffeur, valet, Jeeves and you self-relegate to backseat passenger.

I don’t mean to demonize routine, it protects us; we save ourself from the endless negotiation with the hours of the waking day. But, routine can also be a local optimum, one which we might never break out of without first leaving our routine of perception.

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others' choices make us.”
―Richie Norton

Is intentionality the opposite of routine? Is it the silver bullet that can slay the time-sucking beast?

I wrote this piece because for most of my life, I’ve felt like a fugitive hiding from the insidious march of time. It might sound silly for a 12 year old to worry that “the days are long, but the years are short”, yet I truly was haunted by the feeling, each summer break, that 2 months was so much longer yesteryear.

I found “time flies when you’re having fun” suspect, because time also flew when I wasn’t having fun. Sure, boredom felt like the minute hand’s cruel dominion on the flow of time, but nothing blurred and shrunk quite like a monotonous week: Monday into Friday (thank god!) into Sunday (too soon!), and then back to the starting line again.

So, if monotony was the villain, I thought to extend my days by crusading for novelty. But novelty is not a foundation upon which to build a life. You can choose novelty today and novelty tomorrow, but it is continuity that defines a life, not change. In other words, yes, change is constant, but enduring life requires constancy through change.

I thought also that our perception of time must be rooted in memory, because the days that go the quickest are the ones that seem to bounce uselessly off my hippocampus, leaving no groove, no record of the contents of an entire 24 hours.

So, I sought to triumph here by journaling, episodically capturing the days in my diary, and by taking photos somewhat obsessively—trying to preserve all of life’s special moments by etching them into silicon. Neither of these practices were sustainable, and more importantly, this mindset had the unfortunate counter-effect of taking me out of the present moment, engaging less, living less, remembering less, and so my days continued to accelerate.

Now, I believe I’ve found my answer in a simpler heuristic—living with intention. I treat the hours and days and weeks and years like a garden; I plant and prune routines, curating with intent and attention to detail. This requires mindfulness, and it has led me back to journaling, but instead of daily summaries, I reflect and meditate on questions, decisions, and intentions.

I find that intentional living naturally produces the downstream behavior I sought to directly fix in my past: I orient away from modes of being that are auto-pilot, such as scrolling social media, and seek novelty simply because curiosity is core to me. Intentional living is a highly present way of living, which simply means that I am more mindful, engaged, appreciative, and investigative. This tends to mean that I remember my days and my life more lucidly, as another happy consequence.

I want to end this by saying that we get, if we are to be so extraordinarily fortunate, roughly 4500 weeks in a life. Of this, around 3300 remains when we enter the adult world at age 21, and by this point you (on average) will also have spent ~90% of all the time you ever will get with your parents.

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives, so how did you spend today?

Did you choose, today?

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