While the “Linguistic Hit List” is a regular feature on this blog, it’s time for me to widen my focus.  To creep my scope. 

To take on things above and beyond language, wrestle them to the ground, mark them for execution, try and convict and sentence them, and strap ’em into Ol’ Sparky. 

Today’s docket:  Aphorisms that must die:

“Live Without Regrets!” – If you have no regrets, then you really didn’t risk all that terribly much, now, did you?  Either that, or you don’t care about the slopover.

To “Live without regret” either implies that one has won every one of life’s battles (impossible) or that the consequences of the losses (rare as they may have been) were so utterly bearable that not a single peep of remorse, “what-if” or blurp of retrospective anger has ever crossed one’s mind,  that the consequences really didn’t matter that much, and that they didn’t affect anyone else in any way. 

Let me be clear – this is different than accepting and forgiving oneself for the failures, mis-steps and regrets, and making any amends needed to anyone else affected, of course – but in my humble experience, most of the people who claim to “live without regrets” either haven’t thought about it all that hard, or are solopsistic to the point that they don’t recognize the effects their failures, mis-steps and mistakes have on themselves or others, no matter what they might have been.

“Live Like Every Day Is Your Last” – Well, every day can indeed be just that – and one day, one of them will be, for all of us.  But there are a couple of problems with this aphorism.  Isn’t it just as narrow, self-defeating and self-limiting to focus ones’ life on permanently “living on the edge” as it is to live every day fearing the end? 

Doesn’t this injunction to “suck the marrow from every day” tend not only to leave one without any remaining marrow on the next day of the thousands that bless most lives, but also lend a kind of frantic, treadmill-y-ness to daily life?  Like, if you go bungee-jumping on the day that (one can have no way of knowing is) 12,448 days before one actually ends up dying, don’t you have to come up with something even edgier on Checkout Minus 12,447?  And so on, and so forth (assuming that the edginess doesn’t itself kill you, perhaps in a fit of XtRe3m cordless bungeeing)?  Doesn’t that lead one, necessarily (and providing one doesn’t actually die terribly soon) to become jaded with the whole notion of “living every day like it’s your last”, which indeed contradicts the original sentiment? 

And is a life of inherently less value, less “lived”, if one spends the the day before one checks out blogging, working the job one work to pay for ones’ kids’ food and house, watching Scrubs with ones’ daughter, and talking with a high school pal on the phone than if one climbed the IDS Tower freehand?

And why?

“I’m Spiritual, But I’m Not Religious” – I’m trying to figure out what would have happened back in college if I’d said “I believe in learning, but I don’t believe in study groups, the library or reading books at all”, as if being with a group of like-minded people actually, in and of itself, detracts from ones’ search for spiritual enlightenment. 

No, I know – there are churches, clergy and congregations that don’t help much, that can even interfere with one’s search for God or Truth or Satori or whatever it is you’re looking for, but those are usually individual, situational things.  So what is it, supposedly, about the act of meeting other people who have chosen freely to seek their enlightenment roughly the same way as you are seeking the same that, in and of itself, hinders that search?

More as my memory warrants.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 5:32 am and is filed under mitch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.