Carpe Diem

Nothing is forever.  Everything – every plant, animal, planet, star – exists for a while and then passes.  ‘A while’ might range from a day for a mayfly to billions of years for a star, but pass they will.  As far as we can tell, only humans are obsessed with finding some way of contradicting the nature of things and living longer.  To what end?  The only justifiable motive would be if those extra years benefited others, but there’s little evidence for that.  Instead, it seems merely clinging for as long as possible to the temporary form that each of us calls ‘me’.  Prolonging such a life offers little more than an extended opportunity to shop.

A recent article in The Economist described these efforts to live longer, which in the case of one enthusiast entails rising daily at 5.00am, consuming 100 prescription medications and supplements, working out for over an hour, eating a calorie-controlled diet and fasting from 11.00am. No gain without pain, except that there’s only pain, no gain – try as you might, life for each of us will end.  The futility of it all might be merely diverting if it were not so desperately sad.

The Challenge of Change blogs revolve in one way or another around a corporate resilience training programme, so questions about ‘Life And The Universe’ might seem too deep and profound to be an appropriate topic.  However, the Challenge of Change Resilience Training® is in principle about how life can best be lived.  The training focuses on living as much as possible in the here and now, regardless of how long or short the life might turn out to be, and it offers practical tools for avoiding one of the key factors that compromises well-being: feeling stressed.

The conventional view, that our stress is caused by other people or events, makes us victims of circumstances that we may have little opportunity to change.  In contrast, the training defines stress not as the property of events but as ruminating about emotional upsets.  Rumination is dedicated to salvaging self-esteem – in other words, attempting to put that same ‘me’ back on its pedestal.  A simple illustration is losing an argument with someone, but then repeatedly resurrecting the argument in your mind, but with you magically ending up winning each time.  Nothing changes the fact that you lost, and you’ve forgotten a simple principle of life: win some, lose some, which is unchanged by churning over it.  

To read this blog requires taking the first two steps in the training: waking up and controlling your attention, giving it intentionally to what you’re reading here and now.  Rumination traps us in the past and the future, and the resolution is offered by taking the last two steps in the training programme: regaining perspective by becoming detached, and letting go.  As you read the blog you might be assimilating the ideas into what you already know, which does mean going into the past, as well as perhaps thinking about how they might play a role in your life in the future.  Giving your attention intentionally to past and future in this way we call reflection, to distinguish it from the loss of control when attention has been hijacked by rumination.

Nobody is constantly awake, but with practise of the four Challenge of Change steps we’re able to be more awake and living in the present more of the time.  The training offers a simple strategy for coming into the present: to connect with our senses, which only work in the present.  Nothing can be seen or heard yesterday or tomorrow, except in our imagination, so connecting with your senses will immediately bring presence of mind.  Intentional reflection is how we make sense of the world, and does require taking the past and future into account, but the only time that life is actually lived is now.