How we spend our days, of course, is how we spend our lives.
Why does this seemingly simple quote play through my mind with such consistency? It’s as if Annie Dillard is constantly reminding me of the trade-off between presence and productivity. The mundanity, the busy, the hustle, the answering the texts or emails, the time I spend alone or surrounded by people – that wasn’t my day, it’s my life.
Truthfully, I know the answer – I haven’t quite figured out what that trade-off for a well-meaning life should be. I’ve been thinking about this question for years; mostly since the pandemic stopped me on the busy streets of Toronto and ushered me back to my mother’s home in Sudbury. Since it forced me to pause. To sit in my living room, unemployed and surrounded by books, with sunlight streaming in through the window; into conversations about when I would be called back to my job and plans for my career. It’s as if I was both doing an inventory of what my days had looked like pre-pandemic, while simultaneously enjoying the simplest of life’s moments: my cat asleep on my lap, a solo hike with fresh snow lined through the trees, or watching the sun set from my paddle board.
And what dawned on me during this time was how ill-prepared society raised us by failing to share how interconnected our job and our lifestyle is. That it is not enough to think about what you want to be when you grow up, but how you want to live. Because of course, how we spend our days, is how we spend our lives.
If I could pin point a single lesson from this time period, which seemed to hold a book full of lessons, it’s how fundamental it is to spend time thinking about your lifestyle in relation to deciding what you want as a job. Your job is the city it’s in, it’s the commute and the hours and the schedule and the people you’ll be surrounded by. It will inevitably dictate the life you live. What sounds good to one person will sound like a nightmare to another. Which is why it’s a fool’s errand to compare our lives to one another – the lifestyle you desire will be different than mine.
What I know is that the lifestyle we want today will probably be different than the one in 10 years from now and the one we enjoyed five years ago may not be one that we need now. Maybe we grow and evolve in our job, maybe we find a new one that is more aligned with your desired lifestyle. The thoughtful question of what we want that to look like should be ever-present.
An initial career choice or a mid-career change comes with overwhelming challenges of identity and permanency. It’s a daunting position to be in. We can make it manageable by adding perspective regarding our lifestyle needs. The next time you talk to a high school or university student trying to answer the age-old question, “what they should do with their life,” or a friend who is at a cross roads, ask them what they want their lifestyle to be. Write a list of what it looks like – is it in a big city? Is it one where you get weekends off? Is it one where you work remotely from the jungles of Costa Rica? Keep this list close, and use it as a framework to help guide your career decisions.
If we can put more emphasis on our lifestyle needs, maybe just maybe, we’ll find more contentment in our life. Because of course, how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours.” – Eric Berne
As always, thanks for reading.
Sara
