Without us perhaps quite noticing, much of what we place our hopes in will be ready for
us in a very a long time indeed, in months or even decades from now (if ever): the successful
completion of a novel, a sufficient sum of money to buy a house or begin a new career,
the discovery of a suitable partner, a move to another country. In the list of our most
intensely-felt hopes, few entries stand to come to fruition this season or next, let
alone by tonight.
But occasionally, life places us in a situation where our normal long-range hopeful way of
thinking grows impossible. You’ve had a car accident; a very bad one. For weeks, it
seemed like you might not make it at all, now you’re out of a coma and back home,
but you still have multiple broken bones, serious bruises and constant migraines. It’s
unclear from here when you’ll be going back to work - or whether you ever will. When someone
asks how things are, one answer seem to fit above all: we’re taking it one day at a
time.
Or imagine that a person is 89, mentally agile but very slow on their feet and often in pain.
They had a fall last month and their left knee is badly arthritic. Yesterday they did
some gardening. Today they may go to the shops for the first time in a while. You ask their
carer how they are: we’re taking it one day at a time.
Or you’re a new parent. It was a very difficult birth, the baby had jaundice and required
a blood transfusion - and now, finally, mother and child are home. The baby cries a lot in
the night and has to take some medicines that aggravate the stomach, but last night was
good enough and hopefully today, if the weather holds, there’s a chance of taking a trip
to the park, to see the daffodils. How is it all going? We’re taking it one day at
a time.
These may be extreme scenarios and a natural impulse is to hope that we will never encounter
them - but they contain valuable teachings for anyone with a tendency to ignore their
own advantages, that is, for all of us. One-day-at-a-time-thinking reminds us that, in many cases, our greatest
enemy is that otherwise critical nectar: hope and the perplexing emotion it tends to bring
with it, impatience. By limiting our horizons to tonight, we are girding ourselves for the
long haul and remembering that an improvement may best be achieved when we manage not to
await it too ardently. Our most productive mood may be a quiet melancholy, with which
we can ward off the temptations of rage or mania and fully imbibe the moderate steadfastness
required to do fiddly things: write a book, bring up a child, repair a marriage or work
through a mental breakdown.
Taking it day by day means reducing the degree of control we expect to be able to bring to
bear on the uncertain future. It means recognising that we have no serious capacity to exercise
our will on a span of years and should not therefore disdain a chance to secure or one
or two minor wins in the hours ahead of us. We should - from a new perspective - count
ourselves immensely grateful if, by nightfall, there have been no further arguments and no
more seizures, if the rain has let off and we have found one or two interesting pages
to read.
As life as a whole grows more complicated, we can remember to unclench and smile a little
along the way, rather than jealously husbanding our reserves of joy for a finale somewhere
in the nebulous distance. Given the scale of what we are up against, knowing that perfection
may never occur, and that far worse may be coming our way, we can stoop to accept with
fresh gratitude a few of the minor gifts that are already within our grasp.
We might look with fresh energy at a cloud, a duck, a butterfly or a flower. At twenty-two,
we might scoff at the suggestion - for there seem so many larger, grander things to hope
for than these evanescent manifestations of nature: romantic love, career fulfillment
or political change. But with time, almost all one’s more revolutionary aspirations
tend to take a hit, perhaps a very large one. One encounters some of the intractable problems
of intimate relationships. One suffers the gap between one’s professional hopes and
the available realities. One has a chance to observe how slowly and fitfully the world
ever alters in a positive direction. One is fully inducted to the extent of human wickedness
and folly - and to one’s own eccentricity, selfishness and madness. And so natural beauty
may take on a different hue; no longer a petty distraction from a mighty destiny, no longer
an insult to ambition, but a genuine pleasure amidst a litany of troubles, an invitation
to bracket anxieties and keep self-criticism at bay, a small resting place for hope in
a sea of disappointment; a proper consolation - for which one is finally ready, on an afternoon
walk, to be appropriately grateful.
Vincent Van Gogh was admitted to the Saint-Paul mental asylum in Saint-Remy in southern France
in May of 1889, having lost his mind and tried to sever his ear. At the start of his stay,
he mostly lay in bed in the dark. After a few months, he grew a little stronger and
was able to go out into the garden. And it was here that he noticed, in a legendary act
of concentrated aesthetic absorption, the gnarled roots of a southern pine, the blossom
on an apple tree, a caterpillar on its way across a leaf and - most famously - the bloom
of a succession of purple irises. In his hands these became like the totemic symbols of a
new religion oriented towards a celebration of the transcendent beauty of the everyday.
Vincent Van Gogh, Still Life: Vase with Irises Against a Yellow Background May 1890
His Vase with Irises is no sentimental study of a common flower: it is the work of a pivotal
figure in Western culture struggling to make it to the end of the day without doing himself
in - and clinging on, very tightly indeed, with the hands of a genius, to a reason to
live.
It’s normal enough to hold out for all that we want. Why would we celebrate hobbling,
when we wish to run? Why accept friendship, when we crave passion? But if we reach the
end of the day and no one has died, no further limbs have broken, a few lines have been written
and one or two encouraging and pleasant things have been said, then that is already an achievement
worthy of a place at the altar of sanity. How natural and tempting to put one’s faith
in the bountifulness of the years, but how much wiser it might be be to bring all one’s
faculties of appreciation and love to bear on that most modest and most easily-dismissed
of increments: the day already in hand.
The School of Life is coming to New York from the 4th to the 6th of October for a three-day conference
where you'll have the chance to meet other like-minded individuals and embark on a journey of genuine self-discovery and self-transformation. We hope to see you there.