A Perfect Day
I suppose the goal in life is to have as many ‘perfect’ days in a year as possible. ‘Perfect’, of course is relative. I recently watched a down and out street ‘bum’ come out of a downtown train station with a paper container of fries, announcing to anyone, or everyone who could hear him, that “I have me some fries and they my fries, don’t no one ask me for some, they mine and don’t ask me for money cause I spent it all to get these fries.” The irony, at least to me, is that this guy with so little, was the most contented guy in the train station, at least for the moment. He certainly acted like it made the ‘perfect’ day for him.
As with everything else in the evolutionary process, change and time are the only constants. We all change—constantly—and this means a ‘perfect’ day changes over time too. Humans often make real efforts to prevent change, and with little success. We take vows to ‘love until death do us part” but change over the years may make such a vow inoperable. Love, of course, cannot be forced. It just happens. And the same individual life changes often limit the length of friendships, relationships on a job, hobbies, priorities, music tastes, personalities, and so on.
The perfect day at twenty is not the same as a perfect day at 70. And the perfect day for one person is not a perfect day for another. BUT, there does seem to be some general criteria needed for a perfect day. If we don’t plan carefully in the present, there will not likely be many perfect days in the future. It starts with understanding ourselves, itself a life long endeavor, especially since we ourselves change with time—some more than others.
We also need to come to some sort of perception as to our role in the evolutionary process. Many take the easiest route and simply one way or another, often via genetic inheritance of an organized religion, to decide that success in life (contentment) depends on a personal relationship with God. Any kind of rationale observation of life refutes this notion. To go this route, for the most part, simply leads to endless frustration and often ends up with disappointment (“why God has Thou forsaken me?). If God were really calling the cards on a personal basis He is then responsible for the most horrible events in life that happen to particular individuals or groups. For this to be true ethics simply doesn’t exist. That God does not exist is equally preposterous. For every gift there must be a gift-giver and our own planet is clearly a wondrous and amazing gift. The process which has been evolving now for billions of years must be a process created by God who is responsible for the laws which govern the process. It does not do much good to declare if we cannot be of central importance to the process, that the process is no good or unfair. A more realistic understanding would be that we ought to be grateful for our chance to be a minute part of the process, even if it was by chance, and that as a human we have the ability to plan out ‘perfect days’—IF we are lucky enough via our environment and have enough help from others.
To achieve contentment (maximize ‘perfect days’) we need to live some degree of an ethical, fair, tolerant of diversity, contemplative, sharing, truth seeking, non self serving life. If we are all God’s children in the broadest sense, then we need act like it. When we think of family values it ought to be in terms of God’s family and that would include all evolutionary forms. We could do worse than to worship nature, if worship is to mean have respect for all of God’s gifts through the evolutionary process. We need to have principles which govern our actions and thoughts, principles which include the Golden Rule.
What constitutes a perfect day? It starts with good health—and those who ignore preventive health measures are often destined to pay the price down the road. Assuming good health, it also requires adequate rest. A day begun without enough sleep is not a good omen for a perfect day. Addictions of most any sort eradicate any chance of a perfect day. Addictions by nature are compulsive disorders and compulsive behavior can never lead to contentment. Economic and physical security impact greatly on any chance for the perfect day. When all this is in place, a perfect day is a logical goal.
Perfect days don’t come to us, we ourselves need generate a perfect day. Perfect days come later in life after we have had time to understand ourselves, the evolutionary process, the role diversity plays in evolutionary advancement, and our ethical potential has developed to the point where we substantially follow the Golden Rule as our ethical mantra.
While it is good to be sociable and have friends, it is also necessary to be able to amuse oneself. Those who cannot entertain themselves, but always need others to entertain them to gain contentment are in for a tough road in the long haul. Social interactions involve a good deal of tit for tat and the balance is usually precarious. Someone often starts to think they give more than they get. In a world of human diversity no generalizations can be made regarding the right level of social interactions with others. Each person has to figure out where they best fit into social endeavors.
Probably everyone who enters the terminational years, which start at varied ages, thinks in terms of having as many ‘perfect’ days as possible. What follows is my own plan I devised to accumulate as many ‘perfect’ days as possible before taking that great leap into the unknown.
The Golden Rule establishes my ethical boundaries for all others, and all situations. We almost always know what is right, but too often find a zillion reasons to do otherwise. We also understand that many of our personal blessings came to us by chance, coupled with assistance from others at key points along the way. Life is never a level playing field, and our obligation is to help level the playing field for the least fortunate so they too can have a chance to have some ‘perfect’ days. We can help the less fortunate through direct involvement, financial involvement, or giving of our time to help organizations already existing to help the less fortunate. I chose financial involvement and decided that for every dollar I spend on myself for the basics of life, another dollar most go to the least fortunate. That way others count as much as myself, which is one aspect of the Golden Rule. For those with expensive hobbies, addictions, and materialistic priorities this is a difficult premise. For me it is relatively easy because I have no expensive hobbies or addictions. The only aspect of my life I spend any notable amount of money on is to make a modest home decorated in such a way that this self-made semi hermit has a lodge-like atmosphere into which my pensive activities have the right atmosphere. A ‘perfect’ day for me, given my own nature, involves hours of wandering around in nature, or a urban neighborhood, a morning of writing down my thoughts in the form of musings, interacting with others via internet over a wide variety of topics, time to prepare a sumptuous meal, or eat out for a particular food specialty, time for reading all sorts of nonfiction, netflix (documentaries, movies, stand up comediennes, and nature videos). If I work on any projects in my condo unit I rarely work on them more than an hour or 2 at a time.
Daily, I take care of a former feral cat, and once a week I entertain a horse named Riva. Statistics show people with pets live longer and that, I reckon, is good up to a point. I think for most people, if in decent health, that around 85 is a good time to croak. Living in a large condo unit with a lot of good hardworking people provides me with sufficient interaction on a daily basis with others. The rest of my time I enjoy being a hermit—almost always wandering around by myself observing and mulling things over. I pretty much do what I want each day, when I want, for as long as I want. Wandering around for me is what yoga, meditation, running, traveling, expensive hobbies, social bells and whistle hooplas, etc, are to others. I am always in the most mellow mood after returning from my wanderings for the day. This mellowed out mood lasts well into the evening when the rest of the world is slumbering. About 2AM I turn in, listening to my favorite music before dosing off.
That I suppose, for me, is a ‘perfect’ day. Except, a ‘perfect’ day is not possible. For there to be a ‘perfect day’, if we are sensitive or real enough about our duty to the less fortunate, there would have to exist a more perfect justice for those shackled with less ability to achieve a more ‘perfect’ personal day. While we can be ever grateful for every ‘perfect’ personal day we have for ourselves, there can be no denial of this non-reality for so many others. The biggest draw back with modern media gadgets is that we can be exposed every day to man’s cruelty to man and his entire natural environment, including other species and natural resources.
We do not live in a perfect world but evolution does produce, over eons of time, a more ‘perfect’ world. If God had created a perfect world, change would not be a necessity, Time would not change, and diversity non existent. Everything is so relative to everything else. How could we, for example, know happiness if sadness did not exist? How could we have hope if nothing ever changed? How could we plan a better life, if life was already the best possible? Thus, no matter how much contentment we may achieve in our personal life (never perfect contentment), others do count. Via the Golden Rule others do count. Our own obligations to the less fortunate are real, not imagined, and human ethics is an innate human trait, not something passed down via inherited religion. There are ethical people in all cultures, in all ethnic groups, in all religions, in those without any attachment to organized religion——in all human environments everywhere.
The phrase ‘no pain, no gain,’ has always intrigued me. It seems applicable enough to most everything in life. But late at night, feeling a deep gratitude for my blessings—mostly by chance and with the help of others in my life—and feeling a profound wonderment for God’s evolutionary process, and yet overwhelmed with sadness at the plight of so many other people, other species, and elements of our environment, I am reminded that contentment is not a pure sensation. Contentment is a mixture of competing emotions and dependent on just how much of our own life has been focused, in one way or another, on those least fortunate, not those most like us, or those closely linked genetically to us, or those kindest to us etc so on. To paraphrase Lincoln: “Let us have faith that right (duty attended to) makes might, and in that faith (obligation), let us, to the end, dare to do our duty (to the less fortunate) as we (learn) to understand it.” Success here is about the only kind of success that really gives our lives meaningful contentment.
