On New Year’s Eve when I was twenty-one, I had a chat with a friend I’ll call Vicky. “The last three months sucked,” Vicky said. “I had ten pounds to lose, so I didn’t let myself leave my room, except to go to class, until I hit my goal weight.” She lifted her champagne. “This is the year I can really start living!” Two days later, Vicky was killed in a traffic accident.
I’m sorry if that story just harshed your mellow. It’s been on my mind for decades. Since Vicky’s death, I’ve never been able to stop asking, How would I spend the next three months if I knew they were my last? Sitting in a dorm room waiting for my thighs to shrink has never made the list.
Our culture loves the phrase “It’s never too late.” We want to believe we can toss every adventure onto our bucket lists and accomplish them all. But life is brief. There’s a lot we don’t have time for.
Chief among them, in my book, is worrying about our bodies—specifically, wishing for completely new ones. You can make alterations, of course. Lose weight, or gain it; have surgeons perform anything from liposuction to mole removal. Ultimately, you’ll still have to face the fact that we each get one body per lifetime. The one I’m in now is mine—its puffy little fingers, its strangely shaped skull, its inexorable mortality—and the one you’re in is yours. Vicky spent her final months obsessing about her supposed physical imperfections. It’s too late for you or me to do the same. Instead, consider this: You have trillions of intricate cells performing a vast array of functions with phenomenal precision, even if you do nothing but suck up pork rinds. That’s a miracle. So, enough with the self-loathing, already.
And enough, too, with all the things you don’t want to do but do anyway to impress people. What a waste! My client Gloria is a physician whose first words to me were, “I hate people, and I hate to touch them.” When I asked why she’d chosen such a people-touching profession, she replied, “So I could say I’m a doctor.” This is what I call ego candy. The ego’s appetite for adulation is endless, its capacity to create genuine happiness nil. It’s far too late to spend another minute starving your soul to feed your need for praise.
Nor do you have time for the toxic people you’ve been trying to turn into healthy ones. Many people become wiser, calmer, and more emotionally healthy with age and experience, while other people display neither psychological health nor interest in changing. You may already have spent much of your life trying to get the love you deserve and need from someone in that second group. I’m so sorry, dear, but it’s too late. That love will not be forthcoming.
Here’s an idea: How’s about you spend less time on relationships in which you feel like Charlie Brown, trying to kick the football Lucy invariably pulls away, and spend more time with people who don’t leave you crushed and disappointed over and over and over? Go find the people who are waiting to love you. Because they do exist.
I promise you this: The time you free up can be used in ways you haven’t even imagined. Purging your bucket list creates space for all the little things that make up happiness. Like napping, watching television, petting the cat, climbing trees, or solving crosswords. What sane adult has time for such activities, you may ask, when there are so many Important Things to achieve?
Well, I do. I spent years working hard to accomplish Important Things, only to realize that I get limitless joy from filling my bird feeder, reading books about stuff that never happened, and sitting still for hours at a time, not even thinking. Our culture doesn’t consider these acceptable alternatives to hard-driving, high-earning Important Thing, yet they’re the very activities we turn to once hard work and self-denial have freed up a little time. Think of Vicky. Don’t wait. Free that time now.
If someone accuses you of wasting time, tell them that a doctor (that would be me—I have a Ph.D.) has just informed you that you have a fatal condition (life) and don’t have long to live (even a hundred years is brief in, say, geologic time). Then go back to learning origami or watching cat videos. It is too late to postpone these things any longer.
We are a time-starved people, obsessed with fitting huge achievements into our few years. In the process, we often fill our buckets with things that don’t matter or work. But when we give up on trying to change what can’t be changed and simply embrace what we love, a miracle occurs. We notice that the moment to be happy has already arrived. It’s here, now.