(In 7 parts)
Living a deeper life
Part 1: What do I really want to do with my life?
It is well-said that life is something that happens when you’re too busy to notice. Therefore, those glorious moments of “recollection of our senses”, when we become acutely aware of our state of life, are both exceptionally precious, and they strike us with great force, as we suddenly realise where we have got to in our lives. Therefore, it is not a criticism to say that I now want to live a deeper life. It could even be an illusion that I have not been living the deepest life of which I am capable already. Nevertheless, with my recent retirement, the greater depth of awareness that I feel, now that I have more time and repose, and the much reduced sense of busyness and distraction, mean that I feel able to commit to a deeper way of life. Of course, I would have to find this way of life – to discover what it is – in order to live it, and such a thing might not exist, but I suspect that it probably does. I do also, of course, need to lament and repent that I have not been living a deeper life all these past years. If such a life does exist, then it would have been perfectly possible to find it in the midst of my busyness, so I am in no way suggesting that such a life can only be found in the freedom and peace that retirement brings from the burden of work. It would have been much better if I had been living thus all along, but there is no point in worrying about that now; I must direct myself to the future and see what I can discover. What is it that I sense might now be possible?
There is no need (well, not nearly so much) to be distracted. I have enormously more free time than I used to have. There is no-one in authority over me at work telling me that I have to do this, that or the other. There is no framework of activity dictating what I must do in any sort of daily or weekly rhythm. I might, in other words, say: “I am free”. So, the big question is: “What do I want to do?”. If there is (almost) nothing that I have to do, then what do I want to do? And if I shake off old habits of thought, rather than simply acting in reaction to what I had to do – and so, for example, in contrast to my usual busyness, having no higher goal than reading my book, I can ask the existential question: “How do I want to spend today?” And, freed from the demands of earning a living, there is no societal or organisational role that I need to conform to. This really is a radical freedom. I don’t need to adopt the default model for retirement – that I am having a nice long holiday at the end of my life; I can do something entirely different if I wish. But what is that? I perceive the call “to be strange” both as a critique to the failures of society and to express something inherent in my character, but what is the life-enhancing way to do this?
Spiritual Devotion 