Living mindfully is not always easy. We spend a third of our lives sleeping and most of us spend another third working. This already puts us at a deficit of time and energy remaining for living life. There’s little we can do about the lack of time. We need to work and sleep. Our control over our energy levels is also somewhat limited. What we can do, however, is empower our attitude and reinforce our discipline towards that remaining one third of our lives that should be spent marveling at the rare and precious gift of the present moment. It is insufficient to view this remaining third—this time for living—as a means to simply rest and recover for the other third for which we are remunerated.
We need to fight—and fight hard—to wrestle away some of the weight and pervasiveness of work that can obscure our ability to experience life more mindfully. Work- and money-related concerns lead to exhaustion, which can seriously rob us of our motivation to do things that truly matter. Moreover, Western culture doesn’t provide us with the tools we need to sit still and enjoy natural experience. This article aims to remind us of the crucial importance of shifting our attitude and actions towards our leisure time in two important ways. First, we need to affirm (and constantly reaffirm) that living life mindfully (which I will define later) is more important than work and sleep. Secondly, we need to recognize and accept the fact that living mindfully takes tremendous effort at times.
Grit and discipline to live mindfully
We’ve all experienced the gratifying retreat to Netflix when we were exhausted from work. Conversely, we can recall countless times where we went to work in the morning despite being too tired. We need to bring the same discipline and grit of the latter situation to overcome fatigue and reclaim that one third of our lives where valuable experience occurs.
Before we explore the ways in which we can begin to view our personal time as the most precious time we have, let’s define what I mean by living mindfully. I’ll use the term ‘living mindfully’ throughout this article generally to describe genuine experience and rest. I want to make it clear that this does not refer to ‘happiness’, because not all life’s experiences are happy ones (nor should they be). I’m talking about experiences without desired outcomes. These include cliché ones like spending time with family and friends, or taking a mindful walk on a mountain trail. Living mindfully also includes mundane and recurring experiences like showering, cleaning, reading, or going for a walk in a familiar place.
Living mindfully includes resting, but not what I refer to as ‘escapist resting’, of which a common example is watching TV not because you’re particularly interested in what’s on, but because you’re ‘too tired’ to do anything else. We can classify living mindfully as any time spent without a clear desired outcome.
There are no intrinsic motivators to live mindfully
There are clear and powerful mechanisms in life that ensure we sleep and work. The motivating force behind sleep is obvious: we need it to live and function. It doesn’t take much mental bandwidth to motivate yourself to sleep or to do it regularly and consistently. Work, on the other hand, requires more strategic thinking and energy to perform it well. It’s important to note about work, however, that again there are mechanisms in place to ensure we do it regularly and consistently.
The economies in which we live and participate require us to contribute. We need money to purchase essentials such as food and shelter. Furthermore, we usually have bosses, stakeholders, and performance reviews to make sure we’re doing our best at all times. This last point is critical because yes, work takes a lot of mental and physical exertion, but there are strong external forces there to ensure we do it.
Let’s contrast this with that remaining one third of our lives—our free time. There are no bosses or economic requirements there to remind us to take a vacation from time to time. We don’t have inescapable biological needs there to motivate us to spend time outdoors with friends after work instead of crashing out on the sofa. There is no external pressure to meditate, read, or spend time enjoying hobbies that don’t result in economic gain. So if we lack the intrinsic motivators that help us sleep and work, where does the motivation to live mindfully come from? The answer is that it needs to come from within.
Fatigue is a major obstacle
This is where grit comes into the picture. Think about all those days and countless actions you performed at work despite not feeling like it. We need to cultivate this same motivation to overcome obstacles when it comes to living life naturally. Fatigue is a major obstacle preventing us from living a life full of rich experiences. If we allow the need to rest and recover for work to dominate our free time, we let work infringe on our lives more than it already does.
We cannot take a passive or adjourned approach to our leisure time because it is precious and finite. So we must resist the temptation to indulge in escapist resting such as consuming digital media and instead get up and get outside. We must stay connected to our friends and family as much as possible. There will be times where the weather is poor and where our mind and body aches from fatigue, but we have to reclaim our ability to live mindfully by doing the things we love regularly and consistently.
Mindful living is restful
It may seem that my advice to get out and do something over resting when you’re really tired runs counter to good health practices. However, a mindful walk or a meaningful conversation with a friend can be as restorative as a nap and certainly more enriching than doom scrolling. Moderate movement and mental engagement without desired outcomes is good for the mind and body. Once we get over that initial hump of feeling ‘too tired’, we quickly find that a second wind accompanies living mindfully.
We all know that our time on this planet is treasured and limited, but we’re not always so good at acting in accordance with this fact. It is all too common that work and the trailing fatigue that comes with it eats into time that should be spent living. When we take time to reflect on our favorite memories, we realize that they are filled with experience out there in the real world. When faced with fatigue especially, we need to develop grit and discipline to promote the kinds of experiences that are not only enjoyable in the present moment, but that also accumulate as memories that make for a life well lived.