Returning with a message for dreamers . . .
SEVERAL YEARS ago while sheltering from a typhoon in a sleazy motel in Cincinnati I came across a tattered beer-stained notice pinned to a wall above a public telephone. It read simply: “This isn't a rehearsal. This is Life. Don't miss it.”
It was a message which has ghosted through my life ever since. How many of us can honestly claim not to have mortgaged our lives to some future dream, a dream which as likely as not will never be realized?
We live life on the never-never: telling ourselves that just as soon as we have got past this or that particularly onerous chore or stage we will be able to devote our energies to what we really want to do.
I must admit to being a master of the art of the never-never. Daily I say to myself that as soon as I have finished this or that script, or article or paid off my overdraft, then I will really start to live.
It is, I believe, a delusion I share with the great hopeful majority, and a delusion it is dangerous to harbour, because each of us knows that tomorrow never comes.
Ambition
For some I suspect that this life-long planning for the future is a way of procrastinating: a get-out for not having the will, talent or nerve for trying something new and discovering oneself to be a failure.
How many people have I met who have told me about the book they have been planning to write but have never yet found the time? Far too many.
This is Life, all right, but we do treat it like a rehearsal and, unhappily, we do miss so many of its best moments.
We take jobs to stay alive and provide homes for our families always convincing ourselves that this style of life is merely a temporary state of affairs along the road to what we really want to do. Then, at 60 or 65, we are suddenly presented with a clock and a couple of grandchildren and we look back and realize that all those years waiting for Real Life to come along were in fact real life.
In America they have a saying much ridiculed by the English: 'Have a nice day' they intone in their shops, hotels and sandwich bars. I think it is a wonderful phrase, reminding us, in effect, to enjoy the moment: to appreciate this very day.
How often do we say to ourselves, 'I'll take up horse-riding (or golf, or sailing) as soon as I get promotion,' only to do none of those things when promotion comes.
When I first became a journalist, I knew a man who gave up a very well paid responsible job at the Daily Telegraph to go and edit a small weekly newspaper. At the time I was astonished by what appeared to me to be his complete mental aberration. How could anyone turn his back on Fleet Street for the parish pump? I wanted to know.
Now I am a little older and possibly wiser, I see the sense in it. In Fleet Street the man was under continual pressure. He lived in an unattractive London suburb and he spent much of his life sitting on Southern Region trains.
Lucky
In Kent he became his own-boss, lived within minutes of the office in a very pretty village and found his life enriched tenfold. His ambition for advancement in his career had been smothered by his enjoyment of the life he was leading. His life had stopped being a rehearsal and become the real thing.
I am not suggesting that this would suit every one of us. Unhappily it would not suit me. But in many ways I consider that man in Kent to be one of the luckiest chaps I know.
I am not advocating that one should live for the minute in any hedonistic sense. That isn't the answer. But it is, I hope, an exhortation to some degree on self-fulfillment. Whatever you want to do, do it now: because, no matter how old you are, it's later than you think.
SEVERAL YEARS ago while sheltering from a typhoon in a sleazy motel in Cincinnati I came across a tattered beer-stained notice pinned to a wall above a public telephone. It read simply: “This isn't a rehearsal. This is Life. Don't miss it.”
It was a message which has ghosted through my life ever since. How many of us can honestly claim not to have mortgaged our lives to some future dream, a dream which as likely as not will never be realized?
We live life on the never-never: telling ourselves that just as soon as we have got past this or that particularly onerous chore or stage we will be able to devote our energies to what we really want to do.
I must admit to being a master of the art of the never-never. Daily I say to myself that as soon as I have finished this or that script, or article or paid off my overdraft, then I will really start to live.
It is, I believe, a delusion I share with the great hopeful majority, and a delusion it is dangerous to harbour, because each of us knows that tomorrow never comes.
Ambition
For some I suspect that this life-long planning for the future is a way of procrastinating: a get-out for not having the will, talent or nerve for trying something new and discovering oneself to be a failure.
How many people have I met who have told me about the book they have been planning to write but have never yet found the time? Far too many.
This is Life, all right, but we do treat it like a rehearsal and, unhappily, we do miss so many of its best moments.
We take jobs to stay alive and provide homes for our families always convincing ourselves that this style of life is merely a temporary state of affairs along the road to what we really want to do. Then, at 60 or 65, we are suddenly presented with a clock and a couple of grandchildren and we look back and realize that all those years waiting for Real Life to come along were in fact real life.
In America they have a saying much ridiculed by the English: 'Have a nice day' they intone in their shops, hotels and sandwich bars. I think it is a wonderful phrase, reminding us, in effect, to enjoy the moment: to appreciate this very day.
How often do we say to ourselves, 'I'll take up horse-riding (or golf, or sailing) as soon as I get promotion,' only to do none of those things when promotion comes.
When I first became a journalist, I knew a man who gave up a very well paid responsible job at the Daily Telegraph to go and edit a small weekly newspaper. At the time I was astonished by what appeared to me to be his complete mental aberration. How could anyone turn his back on Fleet Street for the parish pump? I wanted to know.
Now I am a little older and possibly wiser, I see the sense in it. In Fleet Street the man was under continual pressure. He lived in an unattractive London suburb and he spent much of his life sitting on Southern Region trains.
Lucky
In Kent he became his own-boss, lived within minutes of the office in a very pretty village and found his life enriched tenfold. His ambition for advancement in his career had been smothered by his enjoyment of the life he was leading. His life had stopped being a rehearsal and become the real thing.
I am not suggesting that this would suit every one of us. Unhappily it would not suit me. But in many ways I consider that man in Kent to be one of the luckiest chaps I know.
I am not advocating that one should live for the minute in any hedonistic sense. That isn't the answer. But it is, I hope, an exhortation to some degree on self-fulfillment. Whatever you want to do, do it now: because, no matter how old you are, it's later than you think.
(“Standard”, 14 May 1984)
