About Time, Session 8: The Liberation of the Ordinary
What matters is which internal teacher accompanies and guides us in what we do with our life.
Session 7 prompted the question of whether we can dare to be ordinary.
We often burden ourselves with unrealistic expectations—seeking cosmic significance or perpetual fulfillment—only to miss the value in ordinary, finite moments. Oliver Burkeman argues that life’s meaning doesn’t hinge on grand achievements or escaping our limitations but on embracing reality as it is: imperfect, fleeting, and mostly ordinary.
Burkeman points out a common phenomenon. We return to our ordinary life from a good experience and think “more of life should feel that way—that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the deeply engrossing parts to be more than rare exceptions.”
When a good experience feels like a rare exception, self-doubt might arise. Burkeman writes, “It’s deeply unsettling to find yourself doubting the point of what you’re doing with your life.”
That a person can entertain such self-doubts can be a sign that their point of view about time is shifting. Burkeman sees self-doubt as an indication that a person has gained perspective from which to ask “the most fundamental question about time management”: “What would it mean to spend the only time you ever get in a way that truly feels as though you are making it count?”
How might we answer that question? Burkeman warns of the false trap of thinking “grand gestures” are needed and that “each of us has some cosmically significant Life Purpose, which the universe is longing for us to uncover and then to fulfill.”
Burkeman delivers a blunt message:
[It’s] useful to begin this last stage of our journey with a blunt but unexpectedly liberating truth: that what you do with your life doesn’t matter all that much—and when it comes to how you’re using your finite time, the universe absolutely could not care less.
His message might initially seem nihilistic, but we'll discover it's quite the opposite.
Before we get back to Burkeman, let's explore more of Pascal's Pensées.
Pascal wrote, “All men seek happiness. There are no exceptions. However different the means they may employ, they all strive towards this goal.”
Yet, he continues, “all men complain [that they have not obtained what they seek]: princes, subjects, nobles, commoners, old, young, strong, weak, learned, ignorant, healthy, sick, in every country, at every time, of all ages, and all conditions.”
Then, Pascal brilliantly sets out why we persist in fruitless seeking.