I’m getting married to my partner later this year.
We were at her grandma’s a few days ago for her 87th birthday (big up!) and her grandma said, as grandmas do, ‘I wonder how many days it is to the wedding now, you must be so excited’.
Instead of saying yeah and moving on with my day, I remembered the countdown app I installed about 18 months ago and had the genius thought I’ll add the wedding to the countdown app so it will show me how many days are left until the wedding!
I reinstalled the app, opened it up, and boom – the one item I added into the countdown app, perhaps a year and a half ago:
Death – expected: 18,077 days left
Wed 16 Aug 2073
Eesh. Completely forgot about adding that in.
Counting the days
Around that time, 18 months ago, I had the idea that I wanted to find a ‘mortality’ app, one in which I could makeexplicit to myself the number of days I had left in my life vs. the average life expectancy. I wanted to remind myself of my mortality, and therefore give myself motivation to live more deeply.
Of course, I don’t know when I’m actually going to die, it is an estimate, and I estimated about the age of 80. In the UK men are looking on average at about 80.90 years, so that’s reasonable.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t find exactly the app I wanted, but I did find this standard countdown app into which I guess most people put things like ‘holiday’, or ‘birthday’, not ‘death’.
I appreciate some people may find this morbid, but I don’t at all. It’s all about framing. Yes, it is possible to look at it through the lens of something to dwell sadly on, but it is also possible to view it through the lens of my time is limited and precious, I must act now to live life on my terms.
Looked at another way, I could live life, do one thing I’m indifferent to after the next, not reflect on it and then one day keel over from a heart attack. I could also intentionally fill my life, my days, my minutes, my seconds with things that I honestly like and want to be doing. It doesn’t really matter to anyone except me. Only I can really tell the difference.
A stressor
However, it’s important to recognise that having a counter can be a stressor. For me, I can look at it and then feel the need to do a million things at once, but also simultaneously feel that I don’t have enough time, and angry at myself for not working out what it is I actually need to be doing. I want to be productive and conquer the world, but I also want to just chill and take it in, the wonder of simply being this miraculous concoction of particles. I think this frustrating feeling of urge-to-do-something-but-not-sure-what is just part of the buy-in cost, but it’s a good buy-in cost, because it’s telling me something and I have to work out what it’s telling me. On balance, I think knowing the days to the expected life expectancy is useful information to made explicit to myself, and then I can choose what to do with that information.
Back to reality
Look, I’m giving it all that with this high and mighty stuff, and it’s a nice idea, but I haven’t opened the app since I initially put ‘death’ in until now. That’s why it came as a bit of a shock when I opened it again the other day.
Anyway, folks, if I were to live to the average age of death in the UK, of which there is no guarantee, I have 18,077 days left to live. I wonder how many days you have?
We’d better use them wisely!
Also, I have 109 days until the wedding, as I then informed her 87 year old grandma.
I spent the last 10 days in the process of writing a post that I’ve ended up ditching. It started off on one point, but then meandered off somewhere else without really saying anything coherent.
And my response? I didn’t want anything to do with it. In fact, I set the whole enterprise aside and didn’t blog for a week. I got up a bit later than usual. I beat myself up over not blogging and used the excuse that it’s because of my new exercise routine. Funny though, while not blogging I managed to find just the right amount of time to exercise…
The truth of the matter – I’ve been getting up late because I didn’t want to deal with the post, and so I didn’t want to associate with it.
What didn’t I want to deal with?
I’d already put a lot of words down. I’d put a lot of time into it. I didn’t want to write any of that off.
I didn’t want to start with something new while I was still doing the draft. It felt like I was cheating on it. Guilty.
I felt like something was there, some coherence could have been found, but I’d have to do a lot of work to make it work, a lot of re-writing, a lot of heavy lifting.
The direction it went in got pretty heavy, so I was feeling heavy about it.
Apologies for the self-referential ‘blogging about blogging’, but let me re-frame it for you, for greater relevance, as blogging about a personally challenging endeavour. I assure you what I’m writing about is universal.
The cycle repeats
It’s not the first time I’ve done this. I have a ‘Drafts’ folder in Google Drive with, as of today, 9 semi-completed posts that I’ve abandoned. I know I went through a similar process with each of them as well i.e. writing, meandering, doing everything possible to avoid writing.
On reflection, I’ve had the insight that the core issue here for me is letting go. Jeez, I know, such a pop culture cliche, but actually so, so relevant to reality, because I see it absolutely everywhere – people not letting go of things that really they should be letting go of, myself included.
Letting go
It’s hard to let go. It’s really difficult.
Why? Three things I can think of:
Not being aware that there is a need to let go of something
Not being aware of what it is we need to let go of
Not being aware of how to let go
A note – you don’t have to go looking for (1) if (1) doesn’t exist. Maybe there is nothing to let go of, but sometimes there is.
Another note – even if we know (1), we might not know (2), and even if we know (2), we might not know (3).
A significant hurdle to the above is that we aren’t honest with ourselves. Unconsciously, we hide things from ourselves. I’m stretching into a we rather than I because while I know I do this, I know other people do it as well. Right now, I know that there are some hard truths that I’d rather avoid, lurking in the deep, dark depths of myself. I know that’s the same for other people. It is an issue because these things in our depths are strong determinants of what we do and how we think about our lives.
I know that if I want to live my best possible life, I must improve my understanding of myself, wipe off the dirt to see what is underneath, make it explicit, and then I can find my way.
Start from scratch
There are many contexts for letting go, from small to life-altering. Here are two from my life:
The financial model
A few years ago in my day job, I’d created a financial model for the company I worked for that had served its purpose for perhaps 6 months or so, but then couldn’t handle some significant iterations that were happening in the company. A lot of time had gone into building this model, and it had layer upon layer of smaller iterations. I took my boss through how difficult it would be to account for these significant iterations and he simply said start from scratch. Wow. Really? Start from scratch? That hadn’t even occurred to me. Are you sure? Yup. Sad I know, but this was actually freeing, a weight lifted, so much so that the memory really stuck with me. I re-designed the financial model with much better back-end (and front-end) functionality, such that it stuck around for the remaining 2 years I was there and is still in use today. And it was as easy as just being given permission to start afresh (albeit from an external authority – necessary in this context).
The best man
For the longest time, I envisioned that my best friend from secondary school was going to be my best man at my distant, future wedding. However, we fell out of contact after high school as I moved country and our lives separated, yet for years I still had this unchallenged vision of him as my best man. However, when I started more seriously considering proposing to my partner two years ago, my focus sharpened and I realised that I hadn’t spoken to the guy in maybe 6 or 7 years, and it had been even longer since we were super tight.
I wasn’t even aware of this need to let go of something, but on reflection I was hoping that one day our friendship would come back around. It didn’t. I realised I had to let go of this vision that had been there for 12 or so years, which was surprisingly painful, because it meant letting go of all the roots underneath the belief he would be my best man. It was entirely necessary though, because it didn’t align with the way things are.
Applying it to blogging
Blog posts are easier to ditch, because they don’t have such an upfront commitment of investment, but at the time it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like a mountain to climb. Will I ever be able to get through this?
However, the only way is through. Let me use the framing from above:
Not being aware that there is a need to let go of something
A good question here is what are my flashing warning lights? In my context:
Procrastinating on writing. If I haven’t written for, let’s say 2 days in a row, then the light starts flashing.
Feeling heavy about what I’m writing about. Clearly I have to have written something in the first place, so I can only work it out after I’ve been writing the draft for a bit, but if it doesn’t feel good, then the light starts flashing.
Not being aware of what it is we need to let go of
Here I have to challenge myself on whether the warning lights are flashing because of the draft itself, or something different. I have to diagnose, determine causality.
As part of that, I have to understand whether I’m walking through treacle but there is glory on the other side, or whether I’m walking through treacle for the sake of walking through treacle.
Not being aware of how to let go
I understand my warning lights are flashing and I have identified why it is they are flashing. Now I need to rectify. In my context:
Giving myself permission to not finish the draft, to start afresh. Forgiving myself for my inability to get to the end of a post. It’s okay. Really. It is.
Assessing the options in front of me:
I can continue to shovel shit to get the diamond underneath, but who knows for how long (I do want to at least be frequent with posting).
I can heavily revise the post, draw out a certain element and hone in on that
I can simply start another post that I am enthused about writing and move on.
Act on an option. The only way is through.
Through time, hopefully I can see the warning lights more quickly – I don’t want to be procrastinating for a week in heaviness. Clearly, great is great, but I’m okay with putting out something mediocre that I feel is good enough. I just don’t want to put out something I’m not happy with in the first place.
So that’s me. What about you? Do you have flashing warning lights? They might be worth checking out.
Pursuing Awareness 
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