Making the Most of Life
I have often told the story of the time I was returning from Brussels to London on the Eurostar Express. As the train approached St. Pancras Station in central London, it went past some dilapidated Victorian buildings beside the track.
Many of them were covered with a splattered mess of graffiti, slogans, and protest symbols. But one wall carried a message that was clearly readable as the train slowed before entering the station.
You only live once, and it doesn’t last.
So live it up. Drink it down.
Laugh it off. Burn it at both ends.
You can’t take it with you. You only live once.
Those words are of course a summary of the short-lived YOLO philosophy (“You Only Live Once”). The idea swept many university and college campuses briefly as a much-popularized version of what was taken to be Epicurus’s famous maxim, “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.”
But regardless of the distortion of Epicurus, it’s probable that few devotees of YOLO were aware of one original formulation that set out the philosophy with a sharp sting in its tail: “You only live once—if then.”
HOW DO WE MAKE THE MOST OF LIFE?
That blunt version of the YOLO philosophy, and indeed the entire craze for purpose today—books, seminars, conferences, life coaches, slogans, and all—raises important questions: What does it say of how we see the meaning of life, and how we are to make the most of it?
From our dawning consciousness of the world as infants to our waking every day to a new day of life and a world outside us that we can see, hear, and touch, we are always and only at the very center of our lives and therefore at the center of existence as we know it. It is therefore a jolt, a fundamental jolt, to realize how that perspective carries an illusion.
We are simply not at the center of existence. We will not always be here, and the universe will go on without us as if we had never been here. Most people never hear of us even while we are here, and all too soon it will be as if we had never been here at all. For almost all but the tiniest handful of us, the day will come when there is no trace of us in the living memory of the earth.
Thus for all our sense of significance, whether modest or inflated, we are all, as the Greeks said, “mortals.” In the words of a Roman epitaph, “As I, so you, so everyone.” Or as the Bible states simply, “Dust you are and to dust you will return” (Gen 3:19).
Human life is hemmed in by three words and the reality they speak of: mortality, brevity, fragility—the last because all that shows we are alive and separates us from death is a mere breath, and one day a single breath will be our last. Who, if they have ever seen a great performance of Shakespeare’s King Lear, can ever forget the anguish of the old king holding his dead daughter Cordelia in his arms, as if he could put a mirror to her lips and see if there was even the slightest vapor on the glass? “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life, and thou no breath at all?”
One single breath? And a finite number of breaths that in a finite number of days could all be counted? Does the shortness of it all leave you dizzy? Does the truth that we are “born to live to die” give life the sense of Milan Kundera’s “unbearable lightness of being”? Are we to conclude with the writer of Ecclesiastes, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity” (Eccles 1:2)?
Life is so short, and it can as easily be wasted as lived to the full, so what does it all add up to? How do we make the most of such fleeting days on earth? What does such a microsecond life say of our understanding of life, meaning, purpose, identity, truth, and of notions such as right and wrong? What does it say of how we understand what lies behind all of these things—our views of the universe and of time, history, reality, and whether there is a God, gods, or nothing behind it all?
And what does it say of how we are to understand the ideal of an “examined life,” a “life worth living,” and how we live well in our brief stay on earth?
OUR COMMON GROUND
If, as people commonly say today, our brief lives are simply “the dash between the two dates on our gravestones,” what hope is there of investing that brief dash with significance? There are truths that no one can answer for us. We must each face them alone. Our own mortality is one of them. How challenging to stand and ask as Tolstoy asked himself, “What will come of my entire life? . . . Is there any meaning in my life that will not be annihilated by the inevitability of death which awaits me?” And how terrible to come close to the end of life and have to say with Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, “What if my whole life has been wrong?”
“In short, our human challenge is to make the most of our time on earth and to know how to do it.”
In short, our human challenge is to make the most of our time on earth and to know how to do it. Time and space are the warp and woof of the reality in which we live our brief lives as humans, but they are different. When Alexander the Great asked Diogenes if there was anything he could do for him, the flinty old philosopher answered famously, “Stand out of my light!” We can occupy part of space exclusively and block someone else’s access, but no one occupies time exclusively. Time is our “commons,” the open and shared ground for all who are alive at any moment to enjoy together.
More importantly, we humans can conquer space, and we do so easily and routinely with our bulldozers, our cranes, our smartphones, our jets, and all the shiny achievements of our technological civilization. But we cannot conquer time. Time does not lie still before us like space, for it is within us as well as around us, and it is never stationary. It moves, and in one direction only—onwards and unstoppable. In the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel, philosopher and rabbi, “Man transcends space, and time transcends man.”
Importantly too, the comparative ease of our conquest of the world of physical space disguises a vital fact: our conquests of space are always at the expense of using up time. We are spending our time even if we twiddle our thumbs and do nothing, and energetic activism does not solve the problem.
SPENDING TIME
We can build “bigger and bigger barns” or bigger and bigger empires, whether political or commercial, but there is always a day or a night when life ends, and then, as Jesus of Nazareth warned, “your soul is required of you” (Lk 12:20). Which means that the time we have spent in doing anything is the real cost and the proper key to assessing whether we have gained or lost and the effort has been worthwhile.
However effortless-seeming our accomplishments, we always pay for them at the expense of our greatest challenge and the most insoluble mystery of our lives—time. “What does it profit a man,” Jesus also declared, “to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mk 8:36).
Taken from Carpe Diem Redeemed by Os Guinness. Copyright (c) 2019 by Os Guinness. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com.
Os Guinness (DPhil, Oxford) was born in China and educated in England. He is the author of more than thirty books, including The Call, Renaissance, Fool's Talk, Impossible People, and Last Call for Liberty. He has been a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the EastWest Institute. A frequent speaker and prominent social critic, he has addressed audiences worldwide. A passionate advocate of freedom of religion and conscience for people of all faiths and none, he was the lead drafter for both the Williamsburg Charter and the Global Charter of Conscience. He lives with his wife, Jenny, in the Washington, DC, area. Learn more at osguinness.com.