life’s work

I watched Meet Joe Black for the first time tonight. The concept of “life’s work” stuck with me… the idea that a man in his waning years can look back at something concrete that was 40+ years in the making and call it his “life’s work.” Currently I don’t imagine that I’m building toward anything like that despite being stably employed for the foreseeable future. I’m pretty young and I can afford to cut myself a little slack. For a little while. The more I think about it, the more it seems that that little while amounts to not much longer. Which is probably why I don’t think about it often.

Right there on the Twitter home page it asks me, “What are you doing?” Forget what am I doing. How about why am I doing it? For whom, for what purpose, to what end? Can I admit to myself that I’m just doing it to be doing it, just to be doing something? Something other than having some stark, honest time with myself? Must nearly every sentence in this paragraph be a question?

You hate the alarm clock but without it you’d be lost in this dream that just doing something for the sake of doing is good enough. Better to be repeatedly half-awoken to at least squint at something real than to just sleep in so long that you might as well just not show up at all. But that’s what happens anyway if you just keep hitting snooze. I’ve been snoozing a lot lately.