Leave Some of Your Day Without an Assignment
By H.R. Zimmerer
A song comes on and, for a few minutes, you have no desire to become a more impressive person. You want to turn it up. You know the part that is coming and enjoy it before it arrives. Perhaps you sing badly, or remember someone, or find yourself listening so closely that the next thing you meant to do can wait until the song has finished. There is a very ordinary happiness in that.
It would be easy to give the moment a more useful description. You could say it helped you concentrate afterwards, improved your mood or reminded you of something important. Any of those things might be true. But they are not the only reasons the moment deserves a place in your day. You liked the song. You were there to hear it. That is an experience, not an inadequate explanation.
So much of a life quite reasonably concerns what needs doing. There are people to care for, work to finish and consequences to consider. You learn to make good use of time because some days there is not much of it to spare. The difficulty comes when usefulness becomes the only language in which you allow yourself to want anything. An hour must produce a result before you will call it well spent.
Then even a pleasure can begin to feel like an assignment. You read with half your attention on what you ought to learn. You take a walk and spend it assessing whether you have walked far enough. You finish making something and immediately wonder whether it should be better, shared more widely or turned into the beginning of another project. The activity may still be welcome, but there is an examiner sitting beside it.
You can sometimes ask that examiner to leave. The book can be a story you want to continue. The walk can take the longer route because you like the trees beside it. You can remain at the table after the meal is over, talking about something that does not lead to a decision. These things occupy actual time in an actual life. They need not be treated as the spaces between the parts that count.
This does not require a whole afternoon to be free. You may have only the length of a song, a chapter before sleep, a few minutes at the open door. Small pleasures are not made false by their size. Sometimes their particular sweetness comes from being local and familiar: the opening notes you recognise, the comfortable place to sit, the person with whom you can make a joke that would be difficult to explain to anybody else.
I do not want to turn noticing those things into another standard you can fail. You will have distracted evenings. You will hurry through a meal or discover that you were thinking about work during most of the walk. Pleasure is not an attendance test. It is simply worth remembering that your life contains more than the things you are trying to correct, complete or become good at.
There is affection in giving that part of living a little room. You are allowed to discover what you enjoy without insisting that it be admirable. A familiar novel can still be a good use of an evening when you already know the ending. A song can be played again because once was not enough. You can be interested in a conversation that nobody will remember word for word and still be glad you stayed for it.
The things you would miss tell you something. Not necessarily a lesson, and not a new plan for becoming happier. They show you some of the ways you already like being here. Before the day is reduced to a list of what remains unfinished, there may be a sound, a taste or a little stretch of company you want to keep. Let it belong to the day without having to prove what it accomplished.
Prose reflection
When a song makes you want to turn the volume up, you need not ask what the moment is doing for your future. For a few minutes, you can simply like being alive.
Leave some of your day without an assignment. Read the chapter because you want to know what happens. Take the longer way for the trees. Sit a little after the meal is finished. Your life is not only the part you are trying to improve. There should be room in it for the things you would miss if everything became work.
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