A lifeboat on which you find yourself
"You are what you eat" was the phrase when I was growing up. And it's true, isn't it?
But the same goes for everything we do:
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.
– Annie Dillard
That's not to say, of course, that we can't over-schedule our lives and beast ourselves too hard. The reason I'm a stone and a half heavier than a couple of years ago isn't because I'm gorging myself, but because I over-trained to the extent that my body flat-out refused to do any more exercise. That had a knock-on effect on my mental and physical health.
So we need to find what Aristotle called eudaimonia, sometimes referred to as the "golden mean":
The man who shuns and fears everything and stands up to nothing becomes a coward; the man who is afraid of nothing at all, but marches up to every danger becomes foolhardy. Similarly the man who indulges in pleasure and refrains from none becomes licentious; but if a man behaves like a boor and turns his back on every pleasure, he is a case of insensibility. Thus temperance and courage are destroyed by excess and deficiency and preserved by the mean.
– Aristotle
This, of course, changes as we get older which is something it can be hard to deal with. The level of physical activity I was doing would have been fine in my twenties but, given my genetic make-up, wasn't fine in my forties. That would be different for others: I know people who are in their fifties who were puzzled at how my routine could have had such spectacular consequences.
The point I'm trying to make is that some people are facing the golden mean from the side of sloth, while others are facing it from the side of asceticism. Both are problematic, and we should realise that it is still as true today as it was thousands of years ago that the happy life is one of excellence, and that lies on the golden mean.
Source: Are.na block · Life Advice channel