"Who can doubt...that life is the gift of the immortal gods, but that living well is the gift of philosophy?" -Seneca
We hear it time and time again: enjoy the process. A step further, many esteemed individuals hold fast to the idea that success requires an enjoyment of, or at least a commitment to, the process. While true for anyone who seeks to accomplish anything of note, we needn’t isolate the significance of process only to pursuits of particular feats of achievement. Contentment in life itself and in its component parts requires an acknowledgement of the following: much of life is process. Much of life is the in between. Life can be milestones (particularly when we imagine the reel of our lives), but most of life’s experiential content is what happens between them—the small comprising and enabling the context for the big. Life is as much ceremonies and summits as are the days of hoping, seeking, sulking, and training that went into them. Life is the whole and the parts, the beginning, middle, and end. It’s you on vacation and the you working through the day to day before and after it. It’s the business launch and the buildup, the latter being where meaning is actively realized.
Living well requires the diligent referencing of our own internal barometer. Bombarded with imagery of what living "should" look like, it becomes critical to determine what it looks like for us, and at times even more revealingly, what it doesn’t.
A renowned management consultant whose theories formed the basis of modern business and leadership techniques, Peter Drucker was a proponent of the inversion method when it came to asking questions. Instead of asking, for example, “What makes a good life?” we could start from a place of elimination by asking, “What makes a bad life?” Marcus Aurelius offers a similar evaluative exercise when he implores us to ask ourselves whether death would be something terrible if we were deprived of a certain thing. Living well then becomes the active discarding of what does not serve us. Asking such a question requires that we be prepared for the answer, and for the discomfort that may accompany the hard decisions the answer demands.
There’s a tendency to hear something like this as a directive to act rashly, dropping everything in pursuit of an unclear yet grand adventure. While life is short—or more accurately put, fast—its "shortness" doesn’t inherently encourage frivolity. What it encourages is intention—making decisions deliberately as one who is palpably aware of the finiteness of things. Playwright and Stoic philosopher Seneca captures the essence of this poignantly with the following excerpt from On The Shortness Of Life:
"It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.”
And here we meet both our challenge and opportunity: ordering our lives properly. For the person who does so, life has the capacity to be long (read: full). As goes with any philosophical text, clarity of interpretation is key. "Properly" could be best interpreted as effectively, according to one’s intents. A proper ordering is facilitated by congruent living—the act of living in accordance with one’s values, operating in a way that matches one’s intent. The opposite of congruent living? Dissonance. Australian Olympic swimmer Grant Hackett credits his psychologist for giving him the following paraphrased advice: Do more things that make you feel like you. What’s worth noting about this phrasing is that it’s specifically not, do what makes you happy (though doing what makes you feel like you may inevitably breed feelings of happiness). Rather than chasing a vague emotion, this distinct phrasing encourages the pursuit of concrete modes of operating proven to make us feel like ourselves. In the words of Jack Butcher, “life seems to be the process of getting better at being yourself."
Take time to identify the incongruent actions in your life—those out of alignment with who you aim to be—and recalibrate.
One of the first acts in ordering one’s life properly is recognizing how much time we actually have if, indeed, the whole of it is well invested. We mustn’t mistake this for being able to predict or expect a long life years-wise—we’re wise enough to know that we can’t know this with certainty. It’s for this reason that living well rests fully on investing oneself in the season they’re in. Doing this repeatedly is what makes a good life, committing wholly to the season at hand—and the next, and the next. In this approach, we’re freed from feeling as if we need to experience everything it is we want right now. Living well requires only that we give ourselves fully to wherever it is we find ourselves, leaving little room for regret as a result. At this point, the following bears emphasizing: You cannot regret the options not presented to you, only what you chose not to embrace within what was presented. Experiences not presented were experiences not yet yours to have.
In Discourses and Selected Writings, Epictetus speaks of what many tend to perceive as paradoxical feedback from philosophers, specifically highlighting that of caution versus confidence. He implores us to heed philosophers’ advice to display caution in our own will, and confidence in matters outside of it. Put another way, we’re to actively test and assess our own assumptions, behaviors, thoughts, and pursuits; grumbling at matters outside of our control (particularly when unaccompanied by useful action), however, is unhelpful.
“Similarly, fear afflicts us in matters outside the will’s control, while we act confidently and casually in matters dependent on the will as if they were of no importance. To be deceived or rash, to act shamelessly or with unbridled lust—none of this matters to us as long as we have success in affairs outside the will. Death, exile, pain and ill repute—there you will find the impulse to tremble and run away.” -Epictetus
Armed with this view, we can be confident not that occurrences outside of our control were right in a moral sense, but rather, in their external quality, not a reflection on us. Living well is that of applying high intention in and strict attentional focus on matters within your control, matters within your reach. As living presently leaves little room for regret, an acute focus on our sphere of control aids in limiting resentment (or at the very least, in tempering its painful effects).
The beauty of life as process and thoughtful ordering is that we can confidently operate as the person this season calls for us to be, freely making the best use of this chapter knowing it will inevitably fold into another. Living well isn’t doing all things; it’s engaging the things uniquely aligned to our values and intents fully. It's the stewarding of our space of time well, not knowing what’s coming or if it will come, but knowing that honoring the now will make what comes better. It’s actively deciding that if we’re fortunate enough to see the next chapter, it will have benefitted from this one—and if we don’t, we can be content in who we were, what we engaged, and what we gave.
“…the life of every one of us is confined to the present moment and this is all that we have.” -Marcus Aurelius