On sculpting a life you can be proud of
A few days ago, I turned 38. As I read that sentence to myself, it’s still hard to reconcile with how I see myself.
38. That’s almost 40! That’s the age of my parents — my friends’ parents — Mr. and Mrs. Whatever. But me? I’m not almost 40!
But the truth is I am almost 40. Time just kept on moving forward, despite my not having given it permission to do so.
As I’m wont to do whenever I turn a year older, I reflected a bit. But as I started to do that, I caught myself. I was evaluating my life in terms of what I have, what I want, and what I still need to do. But I was missing a vital element in my self-appraisal.
I thought back to a quote by philosopher Immanuel Kant
“We are not rich by what we possess but by what we can do without.”
In all of my self-assessments, I had looked at the things I had accumulated: accomplishments, awards, promotions, etc. But I didn’t consider what Kant had tried to teach me so many years ago — when I first encountered his writing as a young undergrad. For all of the things I gained, what did I become okay living without? What had I become strong enough not to depend on? How much had I fortified my character? What austerity had I become able to endure?
Accumulation
We spend a lot of time accumulating things — whether we want to or not. In fact, as I’ve grown older, I’ve found that things seem to just pile up in my life. This applies both to physical objects, as well as expectations of me and commitments of my time and attention.
The thing is, every one of those ‘things’ — be it a physical object or psychological force — carries weight. Too much of that weight impairs your ability to move freely and enjoy life. It can — after going a while unchecked — begin to feel like too much.
Beyond the weight of keeping things up and paying attention to them, we also develop a dependence on things. We come to depend on everything from alcohol to make us feel “loose”, podcasts to distract us, sugar to soothe us, and the praise and recognition of others to validate us. We come to depend on those things to appraise ourselves, and when we don’t get them, we start to panic a little. We become uneasy. We itch and yearn for whatever we think will fill whichever hole isn’t being filled.
But the holes are never filled. In fact, the more we put in those holes, the bigger they get. They stretch to fit whatever we cram into them, and then a little more — which makes us search for just one or two more things to fill up that space. And so on, and so forth. It’s a pathological condition.
But this condition isn’t automatic. We develop it by accumulating. But when we stop accumulating, and when we get rid of the baggage taking up space in our minds, that’s when we begin to sculpt some character.
Shedding & Sculpting
Sculptures may look like something solid that’s been put together. But as we know, sculptors make their art by taking material away from a bigger block. That’s similar to how we mold our own character.
We shed those things that we’ve accumulated and become dependent on along the way. We reveal our true selves as who we are separate from all those things that we had been accumulating. What’s left after all that is gone is us — our essence. And it’s not defined by what we have, but rather by our intentions, our attitude toward others, and the action we take as a result of those things.
That’s why it helps to ask, from time to time, what can I let go of? As you do this more, and actually let go of things more, it can become a helpful habit. It also compounds. You begin to allow less stuff to pile up. You being to move in a way that doesn’t allow undesirable things to stick to you. You become more focused.
I’m almost 40 now. By all measures, that’s about halfway through the length I can expect my life to be. I may have spent the first nearly 40 years of my life striving to accumulate. But at this point, it’s time to switch to a different mode. It’s time to see how many of these things I can shed.