This is a tricky one to write. I've actually tried to write it a few times already and been unable to do it.
Not because it's controversial and not because it's sentimental, just because, well, it's confusing, and the concept of it confuses me, and I can't get my head around it particularly well.
Many years ago (and I wrote about this in these pages), a wonderful patient I treated, who was a GP who went into industry, called me a human doing instead of a human being. We were having a deep conversation during this treatment, and he was asking me about what I did with my time and how I spent it, and he said to me that I was the human doing.
He wanted to caution me in becoming too much of a human doing because there was a lot of love, a lot of peace, a lot of fulfilment in being a human being.
He actually came back to me later and said he'd spoken to his wife about it and she told him that he was wrong, but it has stayed with me for a long time, this as over and over again, the addiction to doing ‘something’ comes higher and harder and deeper and faster.
The subject came to the fore on Sunday evening in my back garden as I was sat there with Cal (not Callum, my son, but Cal, my son-in-law to be). Cal is a super clever guy, one of the cleverest that I've met, actually, and he thinks in concepts and deeply, he's super well read, he has a history degree, and now he works with horses as a farrier.
He was asking me how my day had been, and I told him that I wondered whether I'd actually got anything worthwhile done during the day, and so he asked me to describe what I had done, and so in short order I'd walked the dog and ridden my bike for about 2 or 3 hours and then come back, relaxed at lunchtime, had some lunch, and then did some work in the afternoon. I then lined my day up so that I could watch the end of the Premier League with Callum (that's really special to him). So we had 3 hours of sitting in front of the telly watching football and the presentation, interspersed by doing other bits and bobs. We then made tea and sat and ate outside because the girls had been at a horse show all day, and while we were getting things ready, it was then that Cal and I had that conversation.
Probably because I'd sat in front of a television on and off for 2 or 3 hours in the afternoon, I started to question whether my day was of any worth, and then I think to myself, I could have, should have, might have got more done or ‘achieved more’, and then I ask myself whether I've wasted my day, and then I have conversations about what it would be like if I was retired and not working, and how every day would meld into the other and I would have no purpose, and how it's important to have a purpose (apparently), and then it comes back to the concept of how do you want to live and how should you spend your time.
I never ever have seen my life as working to allow me to do things that I want to do when I'm not at work, because work has been such a big part of my life, but I don't want my work to feel like that, like I'm trading one thing off so that I can get another, but having said that, when I do get the time when I'm not working to do other things, I don't stack into it as much as is possible, and then I feel guilty because I could have done more.
This is the concept of wasting days, and this is the concept of my patient previously, who accused me of being the human doing and not the human being.
Over the bank holiday weekend, with the heat as hot as it was, I've ‘wasted’ more time than I usually do, sitting down, relaxing, talking, spending time with people, it's funny, isn't it? We have to be careful these days.
When I was having the conversation with Cal on Sunday night, it drifted towards the point about how interesting it was that we were all defined by the work that we do, the jobs that we have. It quickly comes into the conversation when you know someone new.
Wasting days is a skill; it's a wonderful part of life, having nothing to do and not doing anything when you have nothing to do, there's something deep and meaningful and essential, and it powers lots of other things.
At the moment, the way society is tells us that that is wrong, but (within normal limits and on balance, it's not), it's a wonderful thing, a privilege and a luxury, and we should embrace it and enjoy it.
Blog Post Number - 4551