simple living | CW Hawes

On the Shortness of Life

A little over a week ago, I learned of the death of a fellow indie author. I did not know Laila Doncaster, except in passing. We exchanged a few words now and then on Twitter, occasionally retweeted each other’s tweets, and that was that.

Her first book of a projected series was published on May 1st. Her bio on Amazon speaks of looking forward to an early retirement. And now she’s dead.

I am saddened. Very much so. A person looking forward to the future, an exciting future, and now there is no future. She’s gone.

Every now and again someone will chasten me for my attitude towards my writing. The sense of intense urgency I have to put pen to paper.

I am driven to produce as much as I can, as fast as I can, and get as many copies of my books into as many hands as I can.

I’m told I shouldn’t feel so driven. I’m told I shouldn’t be looking over my shoulder for the Grim Reaper, while my pen is scratching out page after page of words.

All I can say in response to these well-meaning folk is to quote Seneca: “The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

Or to paraphrase: I might die tonight — I need to write today. After all, only I can write my books; and I have many score begging to be written down.

Seneca’s essay, On the Shortness of Life, needs to be required reading. It is the antidote to the carelessness with which most of us approach life and live life — which is the most non-renewable of resources.

I’m 67 years old, and I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I’ve wasted most of the time given to me in this thing we call life.

Ever since I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. However, it wasn’t until I was 37 that I actually, in all seriousness, began to act on my desire instead of just dabble. And it was another 11 years before I began to see the fruit of that action.

According to the actuarial tables, I have another 10 years to live. That’s not a lot of time. And anything can happen between now and then to shorten those 10 years.

Seneca wrote:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

There’s some comfort in that advice, yet how many of us know how to use our time and not waste it? I confess I’m still struggling with that one. But here, too, Seneca has some advice for us:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

In other words, it is unproductive busyness, unproductive worry and anxiety, unproductive lack of focus, unproductive preoccupation with things that don’t matter that rob us of the one thing that does matter — irreplaceable time.

It is the life lived deliberately that is the fruitful life. It is the focused life that is the productive life. As Rainer Maria Rilke advised the young poet: once you’ve decided you must write, then you must structure your life so that nothing gets in the way of writing. Harlan Ellison put it more cryptically: “Writers write.”

I might beat the actuarial odds. My mom was 80 when she died. My dad is 87. His mother died in her 90s, although the last few years she was debilitated by a stroke, and his father died a month shy of his 103 birthday. But I can’t bank on it. Which means I have to write today.

As Seneca noted:

…the man who … organizes every day as though it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the next day… Nothing can be taken from this life, and you can only add to it as if giving to a man, who is already full and satisfied, food which he does not want but can hold.

Living deliberately is the key. And when we do, life — no matter how long or short — is time enough to accomplish great things.

Comments are always welcome! And until next time, happy and productive living!

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Cozy Catastrophe Review: Ray Bradbury’s “The Highway”

Good things often come in small packages. A surprisingly delightful cozy catastrophe can be found in Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Highway”, which appears in his 1951 short story collection The Illustrated Man.

The story is very short, only seven pages, and basically has no plot. However, don’t be fooled. Bradbury, by a masterful use of character portrayal, tells a very effective story. In fact, the story is a perfect illustration of Bradbury’s dictum: create your characters, let them do their thing, and that’s your plot.

I am going to forego summarizing the story because I don’t see anyway to do so without giving away the ending, which would be a shame if you wish to read this delightful and thought-provoking little tale. I will point out why I think this story falls into the cozy camp and in doing so give you a bit of a feel for the story.

The Catastrophe

First of all, the catastrophe is quick and there is little discussion of it. A nuclear war has occurred.

The Amateur

The main character, Hernando, lives on his farm with his wife near a river and a road. The road is a main north-south highway, but isn’t a freeway. From the description, we are safe to assume it is a two lane road. One on which lots of tourists travel.

Where Hernando lives exactly is not specified. But because Bradbury also makes clear Hernando’s first language is Spanish, we can again assume his farm is probably in Mexico or Central America.

Contrary to the so-called cozy stereotype, Hernando is not middle-class, nor British. It’s obvious he’s poor. He has a burro and a wooden plow. His wife grinds corn with a block of lava rock. Aside from his farm, the highway provides him with important things which enable him to live apparently somewhat comfortably. The highway provides him money from tourists who want to take his picture, it’s provided him with a shiny hubcap that he and his wife use for a bowl, and the highway provided him with a tire, which he cut up to use for the soles of his shoes.

Clearly, not all cozy catastrophes are about middle-class British blokes who hate the working class.

The Setting

The setting is recognizable. It is a rural place south of the US border. The story focuses on Hernando and his wife. He is going about his everyday tasks when the disaster hits. What tips him off to something going on, is the highway has no cars on it. Something big has happened.

A Survivable World

Suddenly, a stream of cars appears all going north and when the stream is finally gone a lone old Ford shows up that’s overheating. Hernando fills the radiator with water and finds out from the young people in the car a nuclear war has happened. And then the car drives off. What is obvious, there is no sign of the calamity where Hernando lives and we can assume his little corner of the world is survivable.

A New World

The only point I see which might disqualify the story as a cozy catastrophe is the hope of building a better world out of the ashes of the old. For Hernando and his wife, there are no ashes and life goes on. Which is a point Bradbury liked to make: our modern world is too complex and too fragile and isolates us from the simple pleasures of living an uncomplicated existence. So, in a way, for Bradbury, Hernando’s world is the desired new world.

One can, of course, argue something must be survivable for all the cars to have headed north into the war zone. If the US had been totally obliterated, why go there?

The story, though, is about Hernando and for him there is no other world than the one he has always lived in.

Conclusion

In this seven page story, master storyteller Ray Bradbury tells a tale which uses the cozy catastrophe format to tell us a story of the value of simple living.

The tale is very much worth reading and I encourage you to do so. Add a copy of The Illustrated Man to your library. You won’t regret it.

Comments are always welcome. Until next time, happy reading!

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It’s a Wonderful Life

No, I’m not talking today about the 1946 film directed by Frank Capra. I’m talking about life. About why life is worth living. Which, by the way, is the theme of the movie. We are going to spend a little bit of time today chatting about philosophy. I know, I know. Philosophy. Boring. Bear with me and see how eminently practical philosophy is.

We all have one, you know. A philosophy, that is. We may not be able to articulate its tenets, but how we live our lives tells others what those tenets are. Even if they can’t enumerate specifics either, they know exactly what drives us and what we value.

What we value and what motivates us is in fact our personal philosophy. And if we can’t utter it with our lips, we certainly do so by our actions.

I’ve been interested in philosophy for nearly 50 years, ever since high school, and the one philosopher I continually come back to is the ancient Roman Stoic, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger.

Seneca was a fascinating individual in his own right. A man often at odds with his own school of thought. A man who was eminently guilty of not following his own advice.

However, where Seneca, in my opinion, redeemed himself was in his old age. There, in his last years, stripped of power, position, and wealth, Seneca embraced his philosophy and wrote the best advice one person could ever hope to give to another. His Letters to Lucilius are short and pithy and cover a wide range of topics. They are very readable and enjoyable today — almost 2000 years after they were written.

What in particular do I like about Seneca? I’d have to say it is his very practical and realistic approach to life. His advice is reasonable and not freighted with pietistic or moralistic sentiment. It is pre-Christian and fits well with those of us living in a post-Christian age. Ironically enough, early Christian morality and ethics were based on Stoic principles.

As an example, let’s take a look at Seneca’s opinion about wealth. According to our philosopher, there is nothing wrong with having money. Even lots of money. The problem comes, according to Seneca, when we try to cling to our money. The solution, he offers, is to live as if we didn’t have any money. In other words, to live a simple life. By so doing our lives won’t be cluttered with the problems one encounters when one has lots of money.

Seneca himself learned this lesson the hard way. At the highpoint of his career he was one of two tutors to the very young Nero. He had tremendous power and was one of the wealthiest men history has ever known. Bill Gates’ wealth would have been casual spending money to Seneca. When Nero became of age and Seneca realized what the Emperor was truly like, our philosopher gave his money to the young man and retired from public life. Seneca went from being in control of the vast Roman Empire to being a humble patrician farmer.

From Seneca, I learned to value life for its own sake. Not for what I have, because tomorrow everything I have might be taken away from me — as it was for Seneca. The small things and the intangible things give value to life. Things like friendship and contentment. And those are found within a person, not without.

No one has friends who is not first a friend to himself or herself. I cannot love another, unless I first love me. I must, first and foremost, love myself and be friends with myself. Only then, am I capable of truly loving and befriending others.

Contentment does not come from without. It comes from within. If I am satisfied with who I am, then I will be satisfied with what I have. And I will be content.

The human being is a reasoning animal, Seneca wrote. And when reason has been brought to perfection in the soul, we fulfill the good for which nature designed us. We live then according to our nature, as reasonable beings. If we are out of control, if we lack contentment, is we lack love for ourselves, then we are imperfect beings and do not live reasonable lives. We are not living, Seneca would say, according to nature.

The goal of philosophy is to bring us to a state of mind where we live according to that for which we were designed. That is, lives marked by reasonable thoughts and behaviors.

This is a wonderful life if we live according to our nature, according to reason. If we are balanced and content, everything within us and around us will be wonderful.

That is philosophy. And why I find it such a wonderful, non-judgmental guide to life. The good life. The wonderful life.

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