Minim's Musings

Today I was thinking about sayings and epithets that have become such accepted wisdom that we never question them. After all, on the surface, they often sound like the best advice of all. However, if you really think about them, they don’t really hold up – here’s the example that started the old grey matter churning:

"Live each day as if it were your last."

Now what could possible be wrong with that? For all you know, today may well be the last day of your life. It’s possible you might have literally only hours left to live; you could get knocked over by the proverbial bus on your lunch hour; you could choke on your pasta at teatime; you could have a brain haemorrhage in the middle of 'Eastenders'; you could die in your sleep.

One of the great mysteries of life is that we don't know how long we get to live it. If that's the case, then surely we should take the advice above to heart; surely we should be trying to wrest every ounce of joy from every single day because we don't know if we'll get any more.

Just think about it for a second. Imagine you've just discovered that you have an incurable disease that means you will die at midnight tomorrow. What would you do with your last 24 hours? Maybe you'll spend time with the people you care about and make sure that everyone knows exactly how much you love them. Maybe you'll go out in a blaze of hedonism with a 24-hour drink, drugs and sex rampage. Maybe you'll spend the time alone, praying and reflecting on your life.

However you choose to spend your last hours, I bet you any money that it won't involve doing the washing. It won't involve cleaning the bathroom, or making sure the credit card bill is paid on time. For most of us, it won't even involve going to work - unless it's to tell them to shove their poxy job where the sun doesn't shine.

And whatever you decided to do with your last day, you'd be quite entitled to do it. But just imagine that you did stuff like that every day. Not only would you run out of underwear in a couple of days, you'd be living in a pigsty, the bills wouldn't get paid, you'd accrue all kinds of financial charges and you wouldn't have any money coming in because you've told your boss to do something anatomically impossible with your employment particulars. Trust me, you'd be starving on the streets in a matter of weeks.

Now just imagine, that everybody in the world was doing the same. After some unbelievable orgies, enormous crime sprees and more drinking than a Scottish Stag Do, the world would be utterly ruined.

If we think about it logically, we do know it's not realistic to expect to live each day as if it were our last, but, uncertain of our longevity, we still feel that there is some truth in that statement. This just makes us feel guilty when today we lived the humdrum day, the average day, the unspectacular day. Today, we lived the day when we paired the socks up, did the shopping, bleached the toilet and had an early night.

So I say look forward. Be optimistic you will have more days ahead. Make plans, set goals, take the first steps on journeys towards where you want to be - even if that first step is making sure you have enough clean pants to get you through the week!

Forget the impossibility of living each day as if it were your last. Instead, I would like to suggest this:

"Live each day as if it were your first."

Okay, now that's pretty spooky! I logged on here to write a post with the title above and what should I see on the right-hand side of the page but a post with exactly the same title! I think that serendipity would approve and demand that I link to the other post, so you can see it at http://jofrank.blog.co.uk/

However, I'm not sure that I agree with jofrank's definitions of love but then I'm not sure how I would define it either. The thing is, we tend to relate all of our experiences to previous ones. The way our brain functions is to compare each instance to situations we've experienced previously to tell us how to react.

For example, you can tell if a stranger is being friendly or not by reviewing all the times you have met people in the past and comparing the behaviour of the stranger to those who turned out to be friendly and those who turned out to be hostile.

It would seem that our brain functions on extrapolation, comparison and deduction. All of our previous experiences dictate how we will respond in any given situation. I think it could be argued that our progression to maturity is simply one of encountering enough situations to provide us with our own preferred set of learned responses to any situation.

As kids, we learn about what is dangerous and what is safe quite quickly. When a child first falls from a bit of a height, or touches a stinging nettle, it learns that those situations are potentially hazardous and adjusts its behaviour in line with the information from previous similar situations.

But what about love? Where do we learn about that? Of course, here I am talking about romantic love rather than the paternal or familial love that children hopefully experience from day one.

As teenagers, we may suddenly experience an attraction that we haven't come across before. It may take the form of a crush on a teacher, a classmate or a friend of the family but, most of the time, the teenager will steadfastly define this attraction as love.

As adults, we may smile knowingly when we find out about that situation because our experience tells us that it's highly likely that this attraction is temporary and will fade with time. We know this because, chances are, we have been through something similar ourselves and it faded for us in the end.

So here is my question. How do we know what real love is. I mean the love that they talk about in books and films and poems? Surely to understand the emotion fully, we must experience it several times and be able to use those past experiences as a guide?

Ok, let's assume that what I just wrote is correct. Let's also assume (by virtue of it being quite true) that I am wondering if I am in love with someone at the moment. How do I know if what I feel is the 'Real Deal' that we read so much about.

I know that there are bound to be those who will say 'if you have to ask then it's not love' or 'when it's love, you just know'. I appreciate that they may have a point and the reason that I can't see this is that I have never been in love.

However, if you had asked me when I was 16 if I was in love I would have said 'yes' without any hesitation. I was in love (as I saw it) with one of my teachers and there was no way I would have entertained any other possible explanation.

These days, (15 years later) I myself would probably dismiss it as 'a crush' but what does that phrase really mean? I'm not sure that the strength of those feelings I had back then have ever been surpassed. Does that mean I really was in love - or that it was 'just' a crush and I have never been in love since?

About two years ago, I came out of an eight-year relationship. Surely I must have been in love in such a serious coupling? The honest answer is, I don't know. I said 'I love you' a lot, and I think that I really and truly believed it when I said it for the first 5 years or so.

What haunts me is that if that were real love, why could it eventually dissipate. Why is it that I now don't feel any of those things for that person that I was so keen to call love?

Surely if love is the thing that, to paraphrase Philip Larkin, promises to solve and satisfy and set unchangeably in order then I shouldn't have been able to lose it so easily?

And here I am again, at the start of something with somebody new. As I write this, I am sure that I feel as much for her now as I did for anyone that came before and yet I am reluctant to tell her I love her.

Please don't mistake this reluctance for reticence, or mere lack of commitment. It isn't that at all. It's more a fear - a fear that if what I have had before was love then, frankly, love isn't all it's cracked up to be; it can wither and die like even the most beautiful of roses.

The alternative is that I have never been in love in my life and that is why I lack certainty. That is not a happy thought. At 31, I really think I should have come across Real Love at some stage - for God's sake, if not now, when?

I do realise that I may be making this situation unnecessarily complicated for myself, but I still find myself thinking of the chapter entitled 'Parenthesis' in Julian Barnes' wonderful book 'Around The World in 10&1/2 Chapters'. Mr Barnes argues that the words 'I love you' have such power, and are bandied about so meaninglessly that they should be put behind a protective glass front; like the emergency stop on a train, they are only to be used when it's absolutely necessary!

Am I in love or not? I have found the words on the tip of my tongue several times in the last week, but each time I've remained silent because I'm not sure that what I feel is really different from those other times in the past.

I'm not asking you if you think I'm in love - for how could you know? You don't know me, you don't know her, you don't know the first thing about us. This could be my third time in love, it could be the nothing of the sort.

If only we were taught in school what love was and how to deal with it! In fairness, if that were the case we may not be able to recall the Battle of Hastings (1066) or Einstein's Theory of Relativity (Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared) but at least we'd know where our hearts were at 3.00 a.m. in a dark and restless bedroom (I have no idea).

Your guess is as good as mine...

There's a wonderful single-frame Gary Larson cartoon with a caption that reads something like 'Edgar finally finds his purpose' and shows a young man pulling a bizarrely unidentifiable object from behind a sofa.

I've been thinking about purposes tonight. Any self-help manual or motivational literature will tell you that to be truly successful you need to find your purpose. Fair enough, but what if you have absolutely no idea what it is?

I watched the excellent biopic of Ghandi with Ben Kingsley today. Now there was a guy that knew his purpose. Martin Luther King - there's another one. Nelson Mandella, Mother Theresa and even despots, dictators and tyrants like Stalin and Hitler all lived with a grand vision of what they wanted to achieve and how they were going to do it.

In the face of such lofty ambitions, I find it hard to come up with what my purpose is. I'm not going to be a great leader or the instigator of social change, nor is it likely that I will seize ultimate power in a country and put anyone that doesn't agree with me to death.

To be honest, I don't even know that I have a purpose. The problem is that, although I am passionate about lots of things, I don't care about any one thing enough to let it dominate my life. There isn't one thing that I love to do above all else that I wish to shape my life around.

I guess that most people are like that. When we look at people we consider to be hugely successful, they have often pursued one thing relentlessly to the exclusion of all else. I don't think I'm prepared to do that - I'm really not that bothered about any one thing.

I suppose what has set the old cogs turning in my brain tonight is the slow dawning of the fact that I'm unlikely to do anything with my life that will get me a place in the history books. That thought is kind of depressing.

Now I know that might sound a bit insane, but bear with me for a minute while I explain. Like many of us, I feel that I've been kind of sitting round waiting for my life to begin. I still feel like I did as a teenager, that I don't know what I want to do and haven't made any decisions about my future. The plus side of thinking like that is that it means that, in theory at least, literally anything is possible.

When you're young that's pretty much true but as you get a little older doors get closed to you just by time. I know at 31, I'm hardly ready for the scrap heap just yet, but I realised the other day that I'm now really too old to make a career playing sport professionally. This means that I'm never going to score that hat-trick in the world cup final or win an olympic gold medal. I'm just too old. I didn't close the doors to those things but time closed them for me.

Similarly, I'm coming to the conclusion that if I were going to find my big purpose and achieve things that my great-great grandkids will learn about in school, I suspect I would have found it by now.

It was a bit of a shock to realise that my little life isn't really going to be that important in the grand scheme of things. I guess I'll just trundle along, try and have a nice time and one day I'll die and, friends and family apart, the rest of the world will carry on without blinking an eye. I don't doubt at all that it's a ridiculous thing to complain about, but I was honestly a little shocked when I had that thought.

And then it occurred to me that you don't have to change the world to live a significant life. Our lives touch other lives every single day. Somebody like Ghandi touched millions of lives but that doesn't devalue us because we live on a smaller scale.

There are people in this world that love me. There are people in this world who have been positively affected by my life. They won't teach it in tomorrows' schools but that doesn't matter - it is enough to know that it's true.

I don't know if I will ever find my purpose - or if I even have one; but for now I can take comfort in the thought that even if I don't come up with it, it won't all have been a complete waste of time!