The Days

How does your day end? Do you succumb to gravity and crash into the mattress, feeling defeated? Nod off to Jon, Jay or Conan? Or spend a moment looking back over the panorama of your day and pronounce it, like God on the sixth day, “Very good”?

Some nights, I hate the idea of going to bed, resist it like a hyperactive eight-year-old, because I feel there’s still so much to do. I’m not satisfied with what I got done during the day, don’t want the opportunity to end. Other days, I welcome the rest and look forward eagerly to sleeping, and when I feel myself hit the sheets, actually let out a big Ahhhhh of satisfaction, as if I had eaten all my dinner and now been served a delicious dessert.

That latter is how I like my days to end. It is also how I want my life to end. And you? How do you want your life to end?

“Eeuuwww, that’s too macabre—I don’t want to think about it.”

But hang on. They’re not so different: how you end your days, and how you end this day. It occurs to me that what your entire life amounts to is simply the sum of whatever your individual days amount to. As the Virginia Woolf character says in the magnificent film, The Hours: “Always to look life in the face and know it for what it is . . . always the years between us; always the love; always the hours.”

Our lives really do come down to this: how we spend each day. Always the days; always the hours.

I once asked a friend, Scott Ohlgren, if he knew what, when the time came, would be his preferred cause of death. He answered with a single word: “Use.” Another friend, Gianni Ortiz, once shared with me her ideal exit strategy: “To be taken by a sniper’s bullet while in an asana at a yoga retreat.” Now that’s a classy way to go.

How does your day end? How does it flow? Is it brimming over with joy, with excitement, with fulfillment? Have you seen through the illusion of “some day” and made the decision to live a life of vigor, élan and passion right now, today, and not just “some day”?

Too often, we have turned Rene Descartes’s famous dictum, “I think, therefore I am,” into the modern achievement-obsessed, “I do, therefore I am.” We too easily confuse our accomplishments with our selves, as if productivity were the sole measure and evidence of our worth. (Funny thing, too, about Descartes: The Power of Now’s Eckhart Tolle says he got it precisely wrong—that it’s only when we’re thinking that past and future come into existence and we lose touch with present reality. According to Tolle, the truth is closer to this: I think, therefore I am not—but when I stop thinking, I am.)

As I write these words, it is exactly ten years since my mom put aside her toys, donned her PJs and crawled into bed for the final goodnight.

When I was little, she once told me, I had a peculiar way of preparing for bed. I would brush my teeth, say goodnight, then slip into my room and change back into my day clothes, carefully make my bed, and lie down to sleep on top of the covers. Observing this one night, my mom inquired, what was my purpose? According to her, my answer came without hesitation:

“That’s so when I wake up in the morning, I’ll be ready to get up and play right away, without any distractions.”

I like to think that’s how she felt when she closed her eyes for the last time.

I like to think that’s how I’ll feel the last time I close mine.

This article is excerpted from The Zen of MLM. It first appeared as an editorial in the July 2005 edition of Networking Times. The Oscar-nominated 2002 film The Hours was adapted by David Hare from the Pulitzer-winning novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham.