Meditation 8: Leisure

There is more and more leisure time for many people and less and less leisure. Somewhere along the line, true leisure got confused with time off from work, time off from chores, time off from the routines of life. Work is a drag. Time off is fun. However, the usual understanding of leisure does contain the idea of a lack of time pressure, of not having to do something right now. We are often so busy that we forget to grab leisured moments outside socially defined contexts of spending leisure time.

Leisure is not about the objective passing of clock time and how much of it you have to do nothing in particular. True leisure is an approach or an attitude to the time that you have, whether you are working or not. It involves slowing down, not rushing or pushing through time, not letting the clock push you around.

You can find leisure in the dentist's reception room, the minutes you are waiting for the checkout line to clear, the 30 seconds you are put on hold. You can find it gazing at a sunset, walking down the street, or bending down to tie your shoe. At its heart is a savoring of the moment, lingering in the present rather than pressing ahead into the future, or being preoccupied by the past. We cannot always live this way, of course. There are many situations, often part of work, that do require thoughts of past and future and involve timing, attention and concentration. Leisure is good because it refreshes us for the tasks of a complicated demanding world, but if all life were leisure, it would get boring. Fortunately, few of us will ever have to worry about that.

Meditation 9: Pessimism and Optimism

A hundred years ago a certain kind of pessimism was fashionable. The thought was that the world of the past, of the Greeks and Romans, of our legendary beginnings was over. Science took the mystery out of mysteries and left us with only our own ignorance, and this we can rectify as best we can. Our modern civilization robs life of its meaning while at the same time digs away at the supports of its own activity.

The pessimist expects that disaster is the natural outcome of the human adventure. The optimist lives in the same world as the pessimist but expects better things. It is not that the optimist doesn't recognize that disasters happen, but they happen to others. Pessimists feel that the deck is stacked against them, that if something is to go wrong, it is likely to go wrong for them.

Pessimism turns into a weariness of the world and all the world's business. Life is painful and short. People are basically selfish and greedy, and you can't trust them. What can go wrong will go wrong. Don't build up your hopes, for hopes are only the dreams of fools. Give up on life and it will finally give up on you, much to your relief, since the death of hope is also the end of despair.

Optimism chooses to believe against all the evidence of the pessimist that everything is for the best, that the trials and obstacles of life are here to teach us wisdom. There is either a divine providence that arranges everything for the best, or nature herself can be our guide. Look for the positive in everything. Keep your chin up. Hope for the best and don't despair.

Maybe both the pessimist and the optimist are partly right. The pessimist is right that death negates our best efforts, but wrong about what this means for human life. The optimist is right to live as though everything will turn out all right, though knowing that tragedy will strike. Perhaps it is safer to be a pessimist, because you are bound to be right in the end. Bad times come to everyone. It is riskier to be an optimist because the world can frustrate your expectations. Even so, and despite the inevitable end, it is better to live by making the best of what life offers, whether good or bad, than to hide from life in pessimistic resignation.

Meditation 10: Death

What is death to the living? Is it a veil through which we pass into another life? Is it a wall into which we inevitably crash, and from which there will be no looking back? Can we distinguish the thought of a time before we were born from that of a time after we are gone from this world? We no longer have anything to fear from being born. It has already happened. Why then do we fear death?

Death is nothing to the living, and it is precisely this "nothing" that we fear, precisely because we do not know what it is. How can one fear something that does not exist? Sometimes the fear of death is just a fear of dying, a fear of slowly or quickly losing everything that has made life dear, a fear of pain and dependency on others.

The meaning of death for the living is not exhausted by fear. The thought of death also brings sadness. Whatever the truth of religious assurances about an afterlife or reincarnation, the thought of one's own death and the death of everyone you know is still sad. So much beauty leaves this world with the death of each loved individual that however fervently one believes in its translation above, the sadness remains, otherwise funerals would be joyful occasions. The truth is that those who are left behind feel the lack. Death takes someone from the world and leaves a hole where that person used to live.

As for my own death, and yours, I am inclined to say with the philosopher Socrates that we should reserve our judgment about death, since we have no idea whether it is a good thing, a bad thing, or nothing. The trouble is that while you can conceive of your own death abstractly, it is impossible to imagine it, since to imagine is still to exist. Perhaps it is a help to think that no matter how bored you get with life, no matter how jaded, there is us at least one new thing for each of us to do, and that is to die. Timing is all. Until that time, live.

Meditation 11: Assisted Suicide

If assisted suicide were legal, it would be possible to make a date with death. People could choose to say goodbye to their families, their friends and their lives all at the same time.  If it were legal, an individual would no longer have to commit a lonely suicide, write a sad note and then take the pills, pull the trigger or jump off a chair into a noose. One could die with dignity, realizing that it is a right to choose to cease living and to have help in doing so.

Religion has been a key factor in preventing the legalization of suicide because it condemns ending one's life as a sin. People stoically have to bear the process of losing their powers one by one, slowly becoming racked by the pains of debilitating diseases, and wait for the end to come. Without the perspective of faith, this religious view makes little sense and should not involve itself with public policy. If one's religious beliefs prohibit suicide, that is fine, but the prohibition should no longer be mandatory for all. Whether or not there is an afterlife, what possible reason is there for extreme suffering when the desire to live has gone?

Of course, not just anyone should assist a person to die. The assistants should be licensed death planners and counselors. After the proper precautions are taken, people tired of pain and misery would be free to seek help to terminate their lives. These precautions include psychological counseling to ensure that the individual really does want to die and is not acting impulsively. They also include a watchdog body to make sure that old and handicapped people are not killed outright to save money for public hospitals and rest homes, not pressured into assisted suicide by the avaricious beneficiaries or stigmatized for refusing to do the "decent thing."

We are living in an age of enlightenment where assisted suicide should be legal and people free to plan for their deaths by assisted suicide or palliative care. We would be spared the torment of watching our loved ones die in excruciating pain or mindless with pain killers. As for ourselves, if, in one's own steady eyes, infirmity or disease takes away the reason to continue living, then it is rational to contemplate the choice of an arranged death over a slow and painful one. The world would be a better place if human beings had that choice.

Meditation 12: The Most Terrible Thought

What are the worst things that can happen to a human being after dying? An afterlife in Hell?  Repeatedly coming back to a painful earthly existence through reincarnation?  Pure Extinction?  With the possible exception of Pure Extinction, the other alternatives do seem quite terrible, but not as terrible, perhaps, as Friedrich Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of our lives. 

The theory that our lives repeat endlessly is based in cosmological speculation.  Imagine that the universe starts out from the Big Bang.  Later, gravity overcomes the force of the explosion and the universe contracts to a point where we have another Big Bang.  This next universe expands, contracts, and the pattern is repeated to infinity.  One time, the initial conditions a big bang will exactly resemble those that produced our present universe.  Since the same causes have the same effects, everything will unfold just as it did before, and the universe will produce you and me just as we are now, with our personal histories intact.  The result is that we will always live exactly the same life we led the other times this universe materialized.  From birth to death we will repeat the life we live, and live it over and over without end and without relief. 

Of course you will never remember the last time you read this meditation, but that is not the point.  This Aphorism is really an exhortation to live our lives in such an inexhaustible way that we could bear to live it over again forever.  The goal is to live and be able to say "Yes" to one's life in the face of its infinite repetition.  I read this as a challenge for each of us to turn our lives into something like a complex work of art that not even an eternity of repetition can exhaust.  As Nietzsche puts it at the end of Aphorism 341, "The question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?"