How to Make the Most of Your Life

About a month before my son graduated from preschool, I was walking through the park, thinking about the last walk that I would take. I wanted to really experience it, because it would be the last morning walk through the park. I wouldn’t have this opportunity to drop him off and have this nice walk through Central Park. Then it occurred to me that on the last day, it might rain, or I might be running late. So I figured I should really celebrate the second-to-last day instead. But then I thought about it more, and that second-to-last day might not be so nice either. In fact, every day might be a nasty one, so my best strategy was to treat today as the last day I’d get to do this. So every day after that, until the last day of class, I tried to experience each one as if it were the last.

I was letting myself experience today, rather than waiting for some future version of it. I was acknowledging the little death in things. Everything ends, even the small things. This particular morning, with my son at this particular age, in this particular preschool, would never come back in exactly this form. It’s like Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice. The rivers are always flowing, and never quite the same river as they were a moment ago. The same is true of most of what we move through. We tend to fight that, to treat the world around us as stable and permanent. But when we accept that things are always moving and changing, something loosens. There’s more room to actually experience it.

Someone I know had a near-death experience not long ago—the real kind, the kind with a hospital in it. No one should ever have to be in that kind of circumstance, but there was a positive side to it. What she described afterward wasn’t fear. People came to see her, showed who they really were, and ordinary days came back handed over as a gift rather than an assumption. Things she used to walk right past, she suddenly couldn’t stop noticing. Irvin Yalom, who spent his career as a psychiatrist thinking about exactly this, put it plainly, “Though the physicality of death destroys an individual, the idea of death can save him.”

You don’t need a hospital to get there. Harold Kushner has a story about the Garden of Eden that changed the way I think about this. We tend to hear it as crime and punishment. Man eats from the tree of knowledge, man is sentenced to die, man is expelled from the garden. But Kushner reads it differently. Knowledge is the thing that makes us individuals, and only individuals die. A herd of cattle is interchangeable, one steak the same as the next, one egg the same as another. We’re not. Each of us is an individual, and we can’t be replaced by someone else. The same goes for each experience. It’s special, and can’t be replaced by any other one.¹[^1]

I’m not obsessed with death, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a hobby. What I have noticed is how hard we lean the other way, how much of ordinary life is arranged around pretending that things are stable and will never change. We behave as though the mornings come in an endless supply, and the supply being endless is exactly what makes any single one of them feel cheap. The real danger isn’t death so much as wasting time,² letting the days just go by, watching them pass without ever being in them. That’s a far worse existential problem than we tend to admit.

John Maynard Keynes, the economist, had a name for one shape this takes.³ He wrote about the “purposive” man, forever shoving the value of his life out ahead of himself into the future. This fellow doesn’t love his cat, Keynes said, but his cat’s kittens, and not really the kittens either, but the kittens’ kittens, and so on to the end of cat-dom. For him jam is never jam today, only the standing promise of jam tomorrow. You can pass a whole life like that, boiling the jam and never once eating it, saving the good morning for a last day that keeps backing away from you. Better to appreciate the cat you actually have today.

William James, one of the earliest psychologists, said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” He doesn’t say what happens to me. He says what I agree to notice. By that count, most of what crosses in front of us never becomes our life at all, because we never noticed it. The more I attend, the more I’ve lived. The mornings I walked through on autopilot are gone in a way the bright ones simply aren’t.

I don’t remember my son’s last day at that preschool. It didn’t matter whether it rained. What matters are the Tuesdays somewhere in the middle, and those days were awesome.

Footnotes

1. It’s worth noting that no one would actually want to live in the Garden of Eden, beautiful as it sounds. Without challenge, without loss, without anything being particular or finite, it would be unbearably dull. The Twilight Zone made this point in a 1960 episode called “A Nice Place to Visit,” in which a criminal dies and wakes up getting everything he wants. After a month of winning every hand and having every wish granted, he’s going crazy with boredom and begs to go somewhere else. His guide’s response: “Heaven? Whatever gave you the idea you were in Heaven, Mr. Valentine? This is the other place.” ↩︎
2. When we waste time, we often call it killing time. And if time is all we really have, then killing it is a pathological thing to do. ↩︎
3. From Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, a 1930 essay in which Keynes imagined a future where the economic problem had been solved and people would finally be free to figure out how to actually live. The purposive man is his example of the mindset that gets in the way. ↩︎

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“Making the Most of This Ugly Year” makes a related argument from a different angle. Written during the pandemic, it uses the same Twilight Zone episode to argue that challenge and impermanence are what give life its texture. If this essay is about accepting that things end, that one is about finding the beauty in the ugly year that forced the lesson on us.