How Much Of Life Are You Actually Living?

Funnily enough I actually like doing the dishes, and cleaning in general. Unlike almost everything else I ever seem to do, it's a simple task with an unambiguous "end condition", unambiguous and well-defined motivation, and instant payoff with a nice clean kitchen.

I like this passage from Iain M. Banks, which sums up my feelings well:

He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while.

'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.'

He agreed that the table was clean.

'Usually,' the man said. 'I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my speciality... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled... but,' he slapped the table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.'

'But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.'

'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested.

He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.'

'But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me plea­sure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,' the man laughed, 'people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,' the man said with a smile, 'it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?'

Can one actually "imagine the future" in the mindful way the article suggests? Or is that a contradiction in terms? One resolution:

One can imagine an abstract model of a concrete physical object (e.g. a lever; a geometry; a count of objects) and then ignore the concrete reality, and become so fully immersed in the abstraction that one loses track of time. I suggest that this is a form of mindfulness. Thinking about an abstraction is not necessarily mindful: it can be done in a non-mindful way by being constantly distracted by other concrete objects or other abstract models. Mindfulness is flow.

The "future" is a abstract model, and so the above also applies to it.

For human beings, these imagined interior worlds - be they abstractions of objects or of the future - as just as much a reality as the physical world. I suggest that we naturally and instinctively apprehend them in the same way, and both can be done in mindfulness - or not.

Living in the moment doesn't necessarily exclude planning for the future. But it should exclude obsessing about the future. There's only so much planning you can do in this very moment (and it's usually not much, think about how long it really takes to come up with a plan or solution for the first time). Looping over it again and again will not change anything. It'll only make you miss what's happening now.

I couldn't agree with this more, what is life really about at the end of the day? Exploring the world, adventures and meeting people from all cultures and corners of the earth would be my best answer.

Unfortunately we're somewhat trapped in by the slave driver that is money, when you eventually return from travels to settle down, you need to adhere to normal society.

Hopefully the startup will fix that, otherwise I'll just have to do it on the cheap and worry about money later ;)

I am practically there already but I have a few things to sort out at home first, so may have to go an extra mile.

My ultimate goal would be to buy a cheapish yacht (they're cheaper than most people think) and sail around the world, like this guy: www.bigoceans.com - once you've got the yacht its not that expensive, I think that would be the ultimate freedom for me, and you can visit places that the average tourist can't get to!

Saying that, any kind of travel is good. I see you live by your word!