Do you sometimes feel life is a blur? Your life as you live it might not be bad exactly, but you’re so busy that the days fly by and, before you know it, months and years have passed. Even when you aren’t busy, perhaps you feel you’re “living on the surface.” You wonder if there’s more to life or, perhaps more acutely, you feel that there is indeed more to it, a depth and significance to life and living, but that depth and significance eludes you. You can feel it – taste it – because it’s so close, but it nonetheless remains outside of your life, not imbuing it with the meaning and weight you know is there. You think, “If only I could harness it or, even, become one with it.”
 
Well, I can’t know if you’ve felt anything like what I’ve described. But I myself sure have felt this way – many times, stretching over the many years of my life. I remain on my own journey of confronting this need for meaning, significance, and belonging. I am not writing from a place of having arrived, but rather of a daily grappling with these issues. 
 
Today I’d like to share with you some thoughts about each day of living that can perhaps help you enter those depths of meaning, significance, and deep sense of belonging and engagement. Perhaps, you’ll find that all this ‘enchantment’ can come into your life all at once. Perhaps, you’re so very ready for it that that elusive magic will fall on fertile ground and immediately take root. Or perhaps – and more likely – this enchantment can enter your life but more slowly and tentatively and depend on how well you cultivate, through your way of living, that fertile ground. 
 
The motto is: don’t wait for it; rather await it. The latter is distinguished from the former by its active nature, by the call to prepare for it, to set the conditions for its coming into your life and growing there one day – and each day – at a time. 
 
The day is a natural measure of life, of time. It’s an individually wrapped packet of life, a gift in its wholeness with a beginning and end to it.
 
If you see your life and the time across which your life stretches as a gift, then perhaps you can start to see that you ‘owe’ it to use it well. Who wants to be ungrateful? Who wants to squander something of abiding value? With life and its time felt as a gift, you will likely approach making decisions and the choices you make in a different light. First, you may begin to see that your day is filled with more moments of decision than you were aware of. We often just do next what we’ve habitually done, not being aware that we’ve crossed a decision point. Second, each decision you now become aware of can be seen in its significance, that is, in its ability to move you towards or, instead, away from the life you believe you are meant to live. 
 
Decisions are momentous events. To ‘decide’ means to ‘cut off’ – just as to incise means to cut into and to excise means to cut out. So, a decision is a cutting off of entire branches of branching possibilities of where your life might lead. Once a decision is made and implemented, many possibilities will stop being possible; they will never come to be. Thus, each decision can be undertaken with an attitude of gravity. The ‘cut off’ realms of possibility can give rise to a sense of loss and grief and might require coming to terms with that loss – all in service of that slice of possibility that now becomes your focus of pursuit. Much is lost so that much can be gained. What is gained is greater focus and, one can hope, greater commitment, resolve, and achievement.
 
Today I focus on one particular hour of the day: the final hour. Each hour of the day has its own significance. I start with the last hour because I see it as the hour of transition, not only a completion of the current day but also the initiation of the following day. It need not be the beginning of the next day but it can be and, I would argue, should be to give the coming day its rightful significance and a proper launch. 
 
First, a note about the significance of an hour. We all know an hour is a measure of time precisely defined, each comprising 60 minutes, with 24 hours making up a day. But an hour is also a measure of significance, of something significant that is taken on and completed or in which something significant happens or appears. In this sense, the ‘hour’ can be much shorter or longer than 60 minutes. Examples include the hour of our birth, the hour of our challenge or confrontation, and the hour of our death. Each of your hours in this sense has an internal cohesion, held together by the significance of the matter beheld and engaged with, and an external force, a directed and focused acting upon the world. The hour is whole and thus ‘wholesome’ and, by extension if you are open to it, ‘holy’.
 

Your Last Hour: Praising the Day, Preparing for the Next

The last hour of the day is the most significant. It can be the culmination, the rising up and coming to completion. As time moves, the day will end no matter how you approach it or, by default, whether you give its ending much thought. It’s up to you whether it ends with a bang or a whimper, reflected upon or, instead, just drifting to an unceremonious close. 
 
When we reflect upon the day just lived, what is it that we can reflect on? First, we can reflect on the opportunities the day brought. If you believe the day crossed over with no opportunities provided, you can reflect on why you feel that is so. If you’re overworked and overcome with drudgery, is that an opportunity? Maybe not, but it can be made so through reflection. How can (and must) this overwork and drudgery be limited or put to better use? What opportunities lie within it to lessen it or transform it into work that is less routine, exhausting, and demoralizing? Maybe there is simply too much of it? Maybe it’s not the volume of work but rather the perceived senselessness of it all. No matter what: seeing it for what it is can move a person to resolve to change it. After all, a life that is endlessly exhausting is unsustainable. Thus, it will not be sustained whether you plan for it or not. Sometimes the body, mind, or spirit gives out; sometimes, it is earlier than you think it will or should. 
 
Even in a life of too much work of too little perceived value, there is opportunity in looking for the wheat in the chaff. What small bits – if they are small bits – can become seeds for growth and change? What is it about them that makes them generative and inspiring rather than the opposite? 
 
It reminds me of a term that military special operators use: “Full benefit.” Of course, there are endless SNAFUs (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up) that we confront in any human endeavor, but what can we gain from them? Special forces operators, like Navy SEALs or Army Green Berets or Rangers, accept every situation they confront as it comes and learn from it, adjusting then and there while operationalizing their learnings for future operations. The goal is to gain the ‘full benefit’ of that situation and to learn the utmost from it. After all, much of what they confront is a matter of life and death. Not paying attention or complaining passively is a road to failure and possible death. 
 
But contemplating the day in its good and its bad is only part of the reflection. The other ‘half’ is reflecting on oneself and one’s attitude towards this day. 
 
If the day is a gift – as I strongly believe and feel it is – then I also feel a sense of obligation to this gift. If someone gave me an expensive gift, I would not throw it away, take it for granted, or diminish it in any way. Instead, I would feel obligated to make the most of it and to intentionally and explicitly appreciate it. I would reflect on whether I have risen in my use of the gift to meet its inherent value. I would ask myself: Have I used it wisely? Have I learned from it? What else should I have done and how can I do better tomorrow? 
 
Also, when I receive a gift I would like to let the giver of the gift know how much their gift meant to me, how much I got out of it, and how it enriched my life. You may call the giver God. You may think of it as an ungraspable and undefinable force or ultimate mystery. No matter: you can praise the day and praise the giver. The most precious way to praise the day, the gift, is through thoughtful and reverent action throughout the day’s entire course. But putting your praise into words of gratitude helps too. The final hour of the day is a good time for that. 
 
Now, the last hour is also a time to consider the next day. Too often we wake up in the morning and feel either already put upon or overwhelmed or at a loss. This type of negative start to a day can be lessened by considering one’s plan for the upcoming day in the evening before. What do you want to accomplish tomorrow? What do you wish to remain mindful of throughout tomorrow? 
 
And, last thoughts: the closing of the day, so imbued with significance, is a time to look beyond the daily routines and lists of tasks and chores. There must come a time in the day for lifting oneself out of the immediate, the contingent, the obvious, the uncontextualized. This last hour is the hour of contemplation, of praise, of self-appraisal, of identifying and pursuing the truly valuable. It is good to move towards relaxation and sleep with the right kind of activity. It is good to drift off to sleep with something of transcendent value in mind: a philosophical or religious passage, beautiful music, a poem, or thoughts of one’s loved ones. Then the day closes. What we all have in common is that one such day will be our last. Let’s end each one well.

Until Next Time,
Dr. Jack

Language Brief

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it.” – Seneca

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Søren Kierkegaard

“We do not learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.” – John Dewey

“Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.” – James Clear