goodreads — the commonplace book

So I’ve actually read this book twice. The message is simple but I find myself returning to it because it’s so easy to forget. Life is finite. That’s it. That’s the message. The implications drawn from this are pretty simple too but it’s nice to read them. Just enjoy it! I remember spending an evening sitting under a tree outside just relaxing and I remarked to myself that “I wasted the evening”. How ridiculous of me! Because it wasn’t spent reading, working or doing something productive it was “wasted”. First of all, we can’t work all the time. Our mood plays such an important part in that. I think nothing is wasted. We have four thousand weeks, and that’s if we are lucky. There’s no point in trying to stuff every second, just live.

I think this is seperate from what you may enjoy doing though. I explicitly avoid social media for example. I do not have a single social media presence. Why? Because that’s a thing I have determined that I do not want to spend any time on. Does it matter? Maybe not, we are dying anyways, but I think you should still make solid efforts to make sure the things you do spend your time on are high quality. We can’t always

(Another short sample — replace or remove as you like.)

The green light is the whole book, really: the future we row toward and never quite reach. What stuck this time was less the parties and more the quiet at the end of it all.