“What is my life for and what am I going to do with it?” a seventeen-year-old Sylvia Path writes in her journal, fifteen years before becoming one of the century’s most famous poets. “I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.” ¹

Anyone who has spent any time imagining the wonderful things the future might hold has also, almost certainly, met with the same discouragement as Plath. This is thanks to the fact that, as journalist Oliver Burkeman memorably puts it, “the average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” ²And somehow, being aware of this fact doesn’t help us. Instead, it sends us panicking and flurrying so that we’re less likely to settle on or enjoy anything.

I sometimes envy people like Jiro Ono and Yo-Yo Ma who dedicate their entire lives to a single occupation, with such loving repetition and all-consuming focus. It doesn’t matter that I don’t have a particular love for sushi or the cello; their fidelity to their respective callings is awe-inspiring. But most of us do not discover our north stars in childhood, and many of us struggle to find a single point of interest to the exclusion of all else. How do we escape the second-guessing and wistful what-iffing as we blunder through life, sampling, experimenting, and becoming who we are? Or are we doomed to wallow in angst and indecision?

There is at least one solution I’ve stumbled across, in the twilight of my young adulthood. Riddle-like, it’s sitting out in plain sight.

We Are Lucky to Be Alive at All

The horror of being limited and the melancholy at our inability to be and do all the things is rooted in our inevitable deaths. But what if we were to stop looking at life as a given and start looking at it as a miraculous gratuity?

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones,” writes the scientist Richard Dawkins. “Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.” ³He adds the mind-blowing thought experiment of all the possible genetic combinations in human existence. When you think about how few people exist compared to those who could theoretically exist, it’s wondrous to realize you and I exist at all. And that, Dawkins implies, should be the starting point for how we look at life.

Every time I feel frustrated that I haven’t traveled more, read more, or done more I remind myself that it’s remarkable I’ve done anything of it at all. My existence is a blip on the universe’s radar but every minute of that blip is precious to me and the few I share it with; does it really matter if I never get to see the monasteries of Meteora or Bled Island or Ha Long Bay?

If you need a more rousing thought experiment, consider the melancholy Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky who basically lived two lives: the life right before he was about to be executed by a firing squad, and the life moments later when he was pardoned at the last minute and commuted to a Siberian labor camp instead. In a letter to his brother Mikhail, he wrote:

“Brother! I am not despondent and I haven’t lost heart. Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside…when I look back at the past and think how much time was spent in vain, how much of it was lost in delusions, in errors, in idleness, in the inability to live; how I failed to value it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit — then my heart contracts in pain. Life is a gift, life is happiness, each moment could have been an eternity of happiness.” ⁴

I feel convulsions of sympathy for the harrowing anguish Dostoevsky must have felt, believing, knowing he was about to die violently and only at the last moment being spared. Most of us are used to our hedonic treadmills adjusting upward: newer, better things numb us to feelings of satisfaction and well-being. Dostoevsky’s hedonic treadmill crashed to zero, giving him a hard restart that probably made even the tiniest details more vivid and beautiful to him. Most of us won’t have to endure what he did, but we can meditate each day on the miracle that we continue to exist, even if it’s just for a few moments while crunching our cornflakes in the morning.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca sums it up elegantly in his essay On the Shortness of Life: “Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.” ⁵

The Most Beautiful Things in Life are Small

Our imaginations, bless them, love to focus on the big things. When we try to anticipate what will bring us the most joy or “aliveness” we tend to imagine something novel or adventurous (this is why, I believe, a lot of people become nomads. It’s the easiest way to find both).

And while some of my richest life moments were indeed the ones marked by a unique place and event, the deepest and happiest ones happened in quiet, domestic privacy with no one but myself and my loved ones to witness them. Most of these are muzzy and faded: a silly thing one of the dogs did, my daughter’s first burbles of laughter, a joke my dad made during a dinner party that I’ve long forgotten, although I haven’t forgotten how hard we all laughed. This is life: it happens in moments that turn into fragments that you’re lucky to remember. Spend too much time in the future with all its horrible limitations and you will have even less of your precious life left over.

Awards, accolades, adventures, accomplishments, experiments, and endless new experiences: we must make peace with our brains that most of life will not be these things.

The American sage Alan Watts summed it up thusly:

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.” ⁶

In defense of most of us poor saps, I’m not sure if I agree with Watts that the meaning of life here is “so plain and obvious”, although I do agree that it’s simple. And simple things are the hardest of all because they require us to stop chasing what’s shiny and new. Simple things require discipline, acceptance, and lots of repetition, like Jiro Ono in his kitchen and Yo-Yo Ma at his cello. Awards, accolades, adventures, accomplishments, experiments, and endless new experiences: we must make peace with our brains that most of life will not be these things.

“What you can plan is too small for you to live,” writes the Irish poet David Whyte, and I agree with him. We may be horribly limited, but it’s within those limits that our life happens and it can be absolutely beautiful to experience if we’re willing to be there when it does.⁷

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1. Plath, S. (2007). The unabridged journals of Sylvia Plath (K. V. Kukil, Ed.). Anchor.
2. Burkeman, O. (2021). Four thousand weeks: Time management for mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
3. Dawkins, R. (2000). Unweaving the rainbow: Science, delusion and the appetite for wonder. Mariner Books.
4. Dostoevsky, F., Lowe, D. A., & Meyer, R. (1988). Complete letters: 1832–1859. Ardis.
5. Seneca. Dialogues and Essays. Translated by John Davie, with introduction and notes by Tobias Reinhardt. 1st ed., Oxford University Press, 2009.
6. Watts, A. (1998). The culture of counter-culture: The edited transcripts. Tuttle Publishing.
7. From his poem,  “What to Remember When Waking.”