TL;DR
What you experience on a daily basis is not an interruption of your life, it is your life. You’ll start living the moment you stop waiting for the perceived interruption to be over, and embrace the mundane as an indellible part of the ideal future
*“When I was 16, I won a great victory. I felt in that moment that I should live to be 100. Now I know that I shall not see 30. You see, none of us choose our end really. A king may move a man, a father may claim a son. But remember that when those who move you are kings or men of power, your soul is in your own keeping. When you stand before God you cannot say ‘but I was told by others to do thus’ or that ‘virtue was not convenient at the time’. This will not suffice, remember that.
King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem (As depicted in Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven)*
One can hardly stumble themselves into a good life. There is enough reason to think that having goals is necessary for a good life. Even if all arguments in favour were to fail, one must consider that it is etymologically impossible to speak of a meaningful life if such a life was not lived with an end in mind.
While having goals is necessary for a good life, if we bring a resolute focus to the pursuit of our goals, we risk feeling interrupted in equal measure to the number and audacity of our goals.
To use a weak analogy, picture yourself in a room full of people. Your task is to extend your arms for a hug, but to fix them till you find a person of such a size that you need not alter the position of your hands. Now imagine that you have only five minutes to complete the exercise, and “happiness” lies on the other side of the hug. How do you think you would perceive anyone who approached you for a hug, but was not a perfect fit? Would you think of such people as people who, like you, are out to find the hug that fits, or as obstacles that are distracting you from finding your hug that fits? Which interpretation do you think could lead to a less anxious life? We like to think that happiness is on the other side of the mountain, and if we could only clear the climb of boulders and twists and turns, eternal bliss will be ours in perpetuity. We couldn’t be more mistaken.
Happiness is not really at the other side of the mountain, and the boulders and twists and turns are not going anywhere; we will only start truly living when we stop thinking ourselves interrupted by each boulder and turn, and realise that this life, as imperfect as it is, is our life.
Strictly speaking, one can only think themselves as being interrupted. One is equally interrupted to the extent that their expectations of an event sequence are disrupted. And yet, to have any expectation of a sequence of events that is yet to unfold, one must form a definite view of an indefinite future. We tend to think ourselves interrupted in proportion to the faith we place in our imperfect ability to predict the way the future unfolds.
It is also true that for any interaction, any participating party can equally claim to be the interrupted party. Say for example, that a rider is riding their bicycle down a hill as they are in the habit of doing every morning. Say, also, that there is a raccoon that lives nearby and is in the habit of crossing the same road the rider uses daily. If the rider and the raccoon happen to run into each other, who could rightly claim to be interrupted? And can one be both the interrupter and the interrupted? We can only think ourselves interrupted by putting ourselves at the centre of events, and we often pay a hefty price for doing so.
Can we live when we think ourselves interrupted? The answer to me seems to be an emphatic no.
The hefty price we pay for thinking ourselves interrupted is a life not lived, a life delayed.
Firstly, consider that one hardly ever thinks that they interrupted themselves. It is often another that interrupts. To the extent that one thinks themselves interrupted (as a partial consequence of putting themselves at the centre of events), an interruption is an introduction of another agent that immediately initiates a conflict for centre stage. But one cannot win such a conflict, for to be interrupted is to be seconded, it is to be told to wait, to hold on while another unveils themselves. If one thinks themselves interrupted, they wrestle for the centre, and who can run who is wrestling?
Consider also, that one who is interrupted is hardly present. To be interrupted is to have one’s eyes taken away from an ideal and unwillingly fixated on a subject that one would rather ignore. To the extent that the interruption persists, one is not present in the sense that they are living an ideal that they would rather avoid; they are alive, but not living the lives of their choice. Lastly, to think oneself interrupted is also to think oneself as perpetually falling behind; one is delayed in equal measure as the duration of the perceived interruption.
What is the appropriate response to the points raised? How can we stop thinking of ourselves as being interrupted and start living?
It seems to me that the appropriate response is threefold: First, to admit that whatever outlook we have on the future and the nature in which events unfold is based on many untested assumptions; Secondly, to admit that a good life, in keeping with the doctrine of the mean, a good life is to be found midway between an ideal vision for the future, and a holistic embrace of the chaos that unfolds daily; Thirdly, in realising that while we are the centre of our own stories, we are not the centre of the world.
We start living the day we realize that whatever plans we make about the future are based on untested assumptions. We can ride down a winding hill with the assumption that the road will be clear, but how to tell that a racoon is due to make its annual crossing today? Were we to test all our assumptions that we can identify, we would still be unable to say with certainty that we have included all the worthy assumptions. Our best predictions are only predictions; to always keep that in mind is to realise that what may seem to be an interruption is merely an event that we failed to predict.
We start living the day we realize that like many other desirable things, the desire to live a good life necessitates the management of a conflict of opposites: that one would need to be driven by ideals but at the same time an appreciation of the ruggedness and imperfections of daily events; one would need to craft a dream that continues into the waking hours, and yet not hold on too strongly to that dream that the mundane happenings of day-to-day life suddenly become interruptions.
Even more importantly, we start living the day we place appropriate bounds on the exercise of our agency: we must realise that while we are the main characters in our own story, there are billions of stories unfolding around us; we are only partakers in a grand conversation, and in the same way that we did not plan to bump into a racoon, the racoon did not plan to meet us. We are co-existing with many more agents than we can identify, and all what seems to us as interruptions are facts of our life that are meant to make our lives exactly what they are – our lives.