Remember to Live
Remember to Live is a 5-day course on the ancient art of memento mori. It explores how awareness of our mortality, within the constraints of time and attention, can teach us to live: stop postponing, be present, and welcome each day with gratitude. ***This course is available to Dying Every Day members.
The Cost: The Life You Cannot Live
Remember to Live (Day 2 of 5)
There are lives you will never live.
This is one of the quieter consequences of being mortal.
You will never read every book that interests you, visit every place you hope to see, know every person who might have become important to you, develop every talent, pursue every career, or become every version of yourself you can imagine.
At first, this sounds merely obvious. Of course one life cannot contain everything.
But we do not always live as though we believe it.
We keep doors open long after we have stopped walking through them. We preserve identities that no longer fit. We entertain alternate futures not because we intend to pursue them, but because letting them go would require admitting that some possibilities are gone.
A finite life does not merely end. It excludes.
To live one life is, inevitably, to leave others unlived.
This can be difficult to accept because possibility feels like freedom.
When we are young, many paths seem open. We might become this or that, live here or there, build one kind of life or another. Possibility carries energy because nothing has yet been settled.
But a life cannot remain indefinitely in possibility.
Eventually choices begin closing doors. You take one job instead of another. Move to one city and not another. Marry one person rather than continuing to search among possible partners. Have children, or do not. Stay close to home, or leave. Commit to one craft deeply enough that countless others remain interests rather than lives.
Even refusing to choose has consequences.
Kierkegaard understood how intoxicating possibility can be. In Either/Or, published in 1843, the papers of a brilliant young aesthete include a short aphorism titled “Either/Or.” Its argument is simple and dizzying. Marry, and you will regret it. Do not marry, and you will regret that too. Laugh at the world, and you will regret it; weep over it, and you will regret that, too.
Whatever you choose, regret is waiting.
The aesthete concludes that wisdom lies in never quite choosing at all. He keeps every door open and lives behind none.
Possibility opens the future and allows us to imagine what we might become. But it can also become a refuge from actuality. A person can become so occupied with the life that might be lived that the life already underway begins to feel provisional.
Possibility asks, What could my life become?
Actuality asks, What is my life becoming now?
Both questions matter, but mortal wisdom eventually requires the second.
A century later, Jean-Paul Sartre went further: not choosing is not merely consequential. It is itself a choice. The aesthete’s open doors are themselves a decision. So is every someday from yesterday.
We are bound to choose, even though we never chose the conditions we choose within: when we were born, the body we have, the time we are given, or that it ends.
Epictetus put the same thought in the language of the theater:
“Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a kind as the author pleases to make it. If short, of a short one; if long, of a long one. … For this is your business, to act well the character assigned you; to choose it is another’s.”
— Epictetus, Enchiridion
We do not write the play, choose our part, or set its length; for Epictetus, that belongs to God. What remains ours is how well we play it.
There is grief in this, even when nothing has gone wrong.
You may love the life you chose and still occasionally wonder about the life you did not.
What if you had taken the other job? Moved to the other city? Remained single? Stayed closer to home? Become the musician, teacher, writer, physician, farmer, traveler, scholar, parent, or entrepreneur you once imagined?
Some of these questions are useful. They can reveal neglected desires or remind us that change is still possible. Others belong to lives that now exist only in imagination.
Imagined lives have an unfair advantage: reality has never happened to them.
The career you did not pursue contains no bad bosses. The city you never moved to contains no loneliness. The relationship you did not choose contains no misunderstanding. The person you might have become has never had to confront the limits of your actual temperament, body, or circumstances.
The unlived life remains clean because nothing has had the chance to stain it.
Actual life is messier. It contains routines, disappointments, compromises, missed opportunities, and consequences. But it also contains particular people, responsibilities, memories, skills, loyalties, and loves that exist only because we surrendered other possibilities.
When we become fascinated with the doors that closed, we see what was lost. We do not always see what the loss made possible.
This is part of what commitment means.
To commit is not merely to say yes to something. It is to accept at least some of the noes contained inside the yes.
A marriage closes certain romantic possibilities. A vocation excludes other careers. Raising children changes what can be done with money, time, sleep, travel, and attention. Serious work in one craft means less time for dozens of others.
Mortal wisdom is not an argument for staying wherever you happen to be. Some commitments are mistaken, and some paths genuinely need to be left behind. It is an argument against the fantasy that a meaningful life can somehow avoid exclusion.
Every formed life has edges. Without them, much of life remains potential.
