--Marcel Proust, as quoted in Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life
This is one of my favorite passages in this book, where he reprints Proust's reply to a Paris newspaper that asks the question, "What would you do if you had only a short time to live?"
It's not that question that struck me, although I should probably think about it. It was more the way he described our laziness as "hiding" possibilities from us. It seemed strange to me at first, but then it really struck a chord. There are so many things that I want to do, so many steps to my grand plan that could be done on a daily basis, that I just... don't do, and I don't even know why. Is it really just laziness? When I have a rough day it's just easier to go to bed early than to stay up and think about what went wrong, or to watch a meaningless show on TV rather than write, or to spend mindless hours with friends rather than study a language or read the news. In short, it's just easier to fill time with distractions like those than to motivate myself to work independently towards my goals. Why? Two reasons. One, because those activities are not actually more exciting, but are less mentally and emotionally demanding. And two, what Proust says, because I'm convinced that I have my whole life ahead of me to accomplish anything I want. When in reality, that's just as likely not true.
But for me it's not so much that I worry about being struck down before I have time to accomplish goals X, Y, and Z. It's more that I feel like the quality of my everyday life would be better if I was really doing the things I wanted to be doing everyday. Taking the bull by the horns, seizing the day, whatever. It's easy to bide time, to find reasons not to do something quite yet. And even easier to find things to do to fill the hours, things that aren't demanding, that seem like living. But I don't want to watch TV anymore, or spend hours on Facebook stalking acquaintances. I want to read thought-provoking books and spend time with real friends. Don't get me wrong--watching TV and Facebook can be entertaining, and it's fine to do them briefly for that purpose, but I feel like I get them confused with living, and that's not how I want to spend any large percentage of my time on earth. That's not what I would do if I had only 24 hours to live, and it doesn't make me any wiser or kinder or better in any way. It's just filler, and in reality, we might not have as much time as we think.
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