How a Quote Can Derail Your Life
I like a good quote. An expertly crafted phrase can stick with me for days, little bitty words taking up a disproportionate amount of space in my brain. You’ll find quotes on sticky notes over my desk, littering the screenshots in my phone, underlined in books I own. I have a journal full of them, taken from library books or podcasts I’ve consumed. Most I write down and forget. But every so often, one will cause a minor-to-major disruption to my life.
Here’s one that actually sent me reeling:
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard
Of course. Of course it is. The weight of that simple realization settled in my soul and took up residence there. I don’t always have earth-shattering plans for how I’m going to spend my day, but deep down, I do have quite a lot I want to do with my one wild and precious life (thanks to Mary Oliver for that phrase). After I ran across this quote by Annie Dillard, it gave me the kick in the tail I needed to change some things.
For example, I don’t want to spend my life cleaning and maintaining stuff, but there’s five people who live here, and the house isn’t going to take care of itself. Slowly, I simplified my home and put some rhythms in place to keep it running smoothly without taking much of my time, while also giving me the peaceful environment I need to function well. It is not perfect, but the load is light and I have margin now.
I used to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to answer that eternal question: what are we going to eat this week? And I would spend my day stressing about creating a meal plan that met so many requirements: healthy, quick to fix, cheap, and (super important) exciting! I’ll just break it to you and let you know there aren’t that many meals that excel in all the categories simultaneously. I don’t want to spend my life figuring out what to feed my family. I had to quit spending my days doing that exact thing. For the time being, I’ve taken the expectations down a notch. We have a few favorites I just rotate, and it’s ok that none of my meals are worthy of social media or filled with superfoods. They are semi-balanced and nobody’s starving, and I can move on to things more important to me.
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” -Annie Dillard
I know my days are numbered. I’ve lost too many precious people to entertain the illusion that I have lots of time. I have a deep desire to live an abundant life and leave a legacy, as I believe most people do. I needed to have my days line up with the life I wanted.
For a while I took this Annie Dillard quote a different direction, and it caused a bit of havoc for me. I started to think the impact of a life would need to be able to be neatly summed up in a sentence like “she was a missionary doctor for 40 years” or “she started a non-profit that serves thousands of people experiencing homelessness” or something like that. And the majority of my days would need to line up with that synopsis.
Maybe the future will hold something concise and concrete like those scenarios. But currently my life is a little less defined, and that bothered me for a long time. But as I’ve worked to have my days match up with how I want to spend my life, I’ve become a little more comfortable with the nebulous. I have a few irons in the fire, and I believe they are all significant. It’s ok if the newspapers would have a hard time making my life into a headline. What is more important to me right now is to let go of the unimportant, so I can have a greater measure of the abundant. And likewise, I can hold on to and search for the meaningful and significant in my days, and in doing so gain a meaningful and significant life.
I can express gratitude today and have a grateful life. I can be generous today and have a generous life. I can find wonder all around me and have a marvelous life. I can stop the comparison and have freedom.
Because, you know, how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. Thanks, Annie.
