“Life is short. Life is long”.
By Pablo Das (HHC, SEP)
Yesterday I started this series on 8 ways to establish deep wellbeing in the new year by talking about Step 1 having a vision and intention for your life.
Today I want to dig a little deeper into this topic.
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I once had a Buddhist teacher that used to reference a line in the teachings where the Buddha says “life is short, you must live as though you’re hair were on fire!” The teaching was meant to underscore the urgency of this finite human existence. The message is you must not waste time getting clear on what’s truly important. “Wake up. Death is coming! Don’t waste this life!” They shout. Buddhists must tend to “the great matter of living and dying”. It’s a compelling message and there is deep truth there. Life is precious and fleeting, you better get clear on what you want and don’t waste any time.
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But I also had another teacher, Joshua Rosenthal at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, who used to regularly say calmly and with confidence “life is a long time”. He’s not wrong. Most of us get 6, 7, 8 or more decades on this planet, to heal, explore ourselves, travel, create and work towards our goals. Life is a long time!
In his Tony award acceptance speech a few years ago, actor Andre Deshields (at age 73) said “Slow is the fastest way to get to where you wanna be”. He’s right too. Everything worth doing, from cultivating an artistic craft, building wealth, getting in shape, building a business or getting a degree all take years and years of focused, consistent and committed action over the longterm.
So who do we believe? Should we live lwith an urgency informed by life and its finite nature? Should we chill out and take our time because we are likely to get six or seven or eight decades to work it all out?
It’s an interesting thing to develop a life philosophy. Even the development of wisdom takes time. There’s an art to sifting through other peoples wisdom and fashioning something all your own. On this question of how to think about the finite nature of human existence, I have adopted and found a balance between both views; It’s urgent! And slow is the fastest way to get where you want to go.
Because most everything worth doing requires you to make clear decisions, let other things go and take consistent disciplined action on a vision for your life over the long term, it becomes even more important to acknowledge that the clock is ticking.
For alot of my life I was a person who was overwhelmed with possibilities. There are people who don’t know what they want to do with their lives. I’m the opposite. I can imagine a thousand paths. I have so many passions and interests, it can become debilitating. I spent many years frozen. No matter what I was doing, I was always looking over the fence to see what else there was. There are terms to describe people like me. Author, Barbara Sher calls us “scanners”. We’re the people who open a college catalog and want to triple major in music, history and psychology with a double minor in literature and media studies. Another writer dubbed people like me “multi-potentialites”. We are curious and passionate about so many things, we freeze. It’s hard to make decisions because it means that you have to grieve the loss of other possibilities. At very least it means scanner types must acknowledge that you can’t do it all at once. This is why the “three things or less” rule has become so central in my life. As I said yesterday, if you want to be effective and not spread yourself too thin, you
really only get 3 pursuits at most (at any time) and should probably do less.
Given that the clock is, in fact, ticking it’s incredibly important to get a clear vision for what’s most important in your life and get started on deliberately cultivating that life.
The fact that most things worth doing require a long slow journey of focused and committed action over the longterm underscores the importance of getting clear and editing out the noise.
What if you really understood that we don’t have all the time in the world? What if you really understood what it means to consistently cultivate a meaningful life over the long term?
What would you do?
That’s the starting point for my formulation on how to live a life of deep wellbeing. Everything else I’m about to write follows from that.
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Pablo Das is trained as a Buddhist teacher and as a Holistic Wellness coach (HHC). He is a practitioner of Somatic Experiencing (SEP) and is an advocate for a trauma centered, Buddhist approach to recovery from Addiction Patterns.