What It Means to Live

In nineteen years, I can recall only a few days where I really lived.

I live by my schedule-adhering strictly to the goals I set out to accomplish each day and rarely veering from the script. In elementary school, I vividly remember jotting down a list of tasks for myself to accomplish during recess. They often included completing a full coloring book, mending a tether-ball related argument with a friend, and organizing my social calendar for the upcoming weekend. And although the content changed as I got older, the format stayed the same.

For this reason, “Mindfulness Monday” was my living hell. Every Monday in AP Psychology, our teacher would sit us down in a circle and entreat us to close our eyes and sink deep into our thoughts. The silence and the space made me want to blow my brains out. The lack of activity, disquieting solitude, and overall vapidness of the experience reassured me that my approach was right, that I was the true visionary of a fulfilled life. Whoever had invented this mindfulness BS was far off the mark. How could sitting alone in a dark room with nothing but your thoughts allow you to feel anything other than sheer depression?

Living in the present was nothing more than a hypothetical idea to me. The premise of the mantra seemed nice, but it would never work for someone as anal as I. I found my haven running back and forth between errands, it was only when I stopped that I felt uncomfortable. I filled every second planning grade events or studying for upcoming tests. On one of those dreaded Mondays, my teacher handed out a self-evaluation. I had long since decided this exercise was a waste of my precious time and as I was going to throw it out, I glanced at the first question.

“How would you describe yourself?” it read.

“I know exactly who I am,” I told myself as I crumpled up the paper. Unbeknownst to me, it would take me over a year to honestly address that first question.

Though my body lived in the now, my head floated from the past to the future and never in between. Regardless of where I was, I found myself wishing to be somewhere else. I perverted the notion of looking forward to something and turned it into an obsessive “the grass is always greener” ideology. It wasn’t until late last January that I realized how absent I really was. I was sitting in class texting a friend about an upcoming event we were organizing, when my teacher uttered the “M” word-mindfulness. My ears perked up and my mind drifted back to Senior year.

“There are some people,” she addressed the class, “who have never lived a day in their lives. When they’re young they can’t wait to grow up and when they grow up they can’t wait to get married and when they get married they can’t wait to have kids and when they have kids they can’t wait to retire and soon enough they’re dead and they can’t remember a single day they spent on this Earth. These people have no idea who they are.”

For the first time, my future didn’t seem so bright anymore. I thought back and tried to remember a moment that I grasped just for the sake of being alive. Not one moment came to mind. For the first time in nineteen years, my mind was devoid of thoughts.

In two weeks I will be leaving seminary for the first time in seven months. Had this been two months ago, I would have a countdown on my wall and my bags all packed. But the person that I am now would never pass up on two weeks of anything to skip ahead. In fact, I could not be less prepared to leave. And I couldn’t be happier about it. So to answer that first question, “I have no idea, but I’m getting closer to figuring it out every day.”