Squandering life

A friend of mine who is studying Buddhism told me that one of the monks at a monastery where he recently spent several weeks offered this message at morning meditation: “Do not squander your life.” While those words sound inspiring, I wonder what they mean, much less how to actually follow such advice. It seems to be much like the kind of the tedious slogans on how to live that appear in Facebook posts and self-help books, the adages that pop up like head lice in a kindergarten. “Live each day as though it is your last.” “Seize the day.” “Each day is a miracle.” “Live fully.” “You only live once.” And so on. That sort of supposed wisdom comes across as just so much empty prattle. After all, there is a big difference between advice and action, between idealistic theory and the grinding reality of daily life.

So what might that monk have meant? Thoreau wrote about living deliberately. But that seems to be as vague an idea as not squandering one’s life. Maybe one way of addressing that question is to think about what not squandering might mean and then what actions might be considered squandering.

Some people might think that to avoid squandering, a person should seek meaning, to be part of something bigger than oneself. Yet, what if that meaning involves doing something that harms other people, like putting a landfill in a poor neighborhood? Clearcutting an old growth forest? Speculating in real estate by buying mobile home parks and then raising the price of housing for poor people? Joining a neo-Nazi organization? Someone who spends all day eating Cheetos and watching old movies would seem to be squandering life less by doing no harm to anyone else.

To others not squandering might mean using the day efficiently and not wasting time. “Make hay while the sun shines.” Yet if efficiency is the main measure of not squandering life, we would tend to become accountants of our time and actions, doing a continual cost-benefit analysis to make sure we get an adequate rate of return for how we are living. Further, the idea just doesn’t make sense: by that measure a person who makes two hundred telemarketing calls a day would be squandering life less that the social worker who sees only three clients to help them through crises in their lives.

There is a ring of truth, however, to both of those ideas on how not to squander one’s life: to seek meaning and to be aware that life is fleeting. Emerson offers a wise perspective on how to fulfill the monk’s advice, when he wrote, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” I interpret his words as saying that not squandering one’s life is primarily a moral responsibility met by working to fulfill the obligation we each have to others, including future generations, and to the well-being of society as a whole. In that one sentence Emerson nails it.

To have it make a difference that we have lived and lived well, we must also be conscious of the tenuousness of life and the inevitability of death, the inexorable flow of time—hours become days, days slip into weeks, then months, then years, until we find that the calendar has run out of pages and there isn’t another. Life is precious because it is finite. Otherwise, time would be a bland continuum, and squander would not matter. To not squander our life means understanding that we buy each day on credit and that the bill always comes due. Always. We’re born, we live, we die. We have to pay the bill.

In addition to trying to live in a way that is honorable, useful, and compassionate, I think we need something else to fulfill the monk’s advice: passion. By passion, I am not referring merely to physical passion but to a general attitude on how to approach each day, each of those precious days that comprise our life. To avoid squandering our life, we must engage the world around us with passion, for passion is the difference between life and a life sentence. That play on words is apt. Instead of living fully and in the moment, many people seem to be serving a sentence, caught up in tedious daily routine while waiting for something, say vacation, graduation, a new job, a promotion, sabbatical, retirement, and so on. That sort of waiting is squandering, missing out on the possibilities of the immediate, the spontaneous. As Steinbeck noted, “Most lives get dribbled away like piss in the dust.”

Rather than watching the calendar pages flip one after another, we can do a hell of a lot of living right now. In a novel by Kurt Vonnegut, one of the characters says something like, “All my life, I wanted to open the window and make love to the world.” Making love to the world means seeking intimacy with life and not squandering it. Those words also get at the idea of taking chances, of living large, of ignoring the critic inside every one of us who says something is impractical for some reason. Making love to the world and living passionately are the antithesis of squandering. After all, Emerson advises us to be compassionate, and passion is the root of the word compassionate.

While the idea of living fully in the moment and engaging life passionately sounds good in theory, the challenge is how to follow it. Maybe the best the best any of  us can do is simply to be cheerful, not take ourselves too seriously, and look for ways to lend a helping hand. Each morning we might ask ourselves how we are going to live that day in light of Emerson’s words and then at the end of the day consider our answer. While that may not be an elegant approach to the monk’s advice, at least it is practical and doable.