Composing A Life

There is no rehearsal for life.

“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold,” writes Milan Kundera in his 1985 novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” in which he questions whether heavy or light is actually heaviest when the measure is a life. 

Kundera suggests that the burdens of a “heavy” life may carry more meaning and fulfillment than the lesser burdens of a “lighter” life.

Each condition comes with its own package of existential and inevitable questions. Those of us living more extreme lives may never be left alone without the awareness of what we are doing with our lives – living intensely, fully aware of each moment, but with risks and challenges lurking everywhere. Those of us living sedately may never be left alone without the awareness of what we are not doing with our lives – not living them fully, letting the days pass and just happen, and with risks of regrets in their wake.

Extreme living carries risks perhaps of losing what we hold dear, perhaps of going broke, disappointments and failure, perhaps of injury or untimely death. Sedate living carries the risk of poor health, unclear thinking, and a prolonged imprisonment of our own thoughts and questions of why we didn’t do this or that. 

Each of us has to weigh the cost and the possible payback of taking risks or not on the large scale of our lives. We make these choices whether we know it or not. We can do it with open eyes or with willfully shut eyes, but our gut knows: did I play it safe or did I take risks for a bigger prize.
For what prize? What prize is worthy of our life? Our whole life?

If we play it safe, our minds are at ease as the state of affairs is predictable. Often it appears that a less conscious choice is made, that life happened to happen this way. But we know we chose the safe path.

If we take the risks, we may consciously put our financial stability, our mental facilities, our physical well-being, or even our life on the line.
However, taking risks may not always be a fully determined choice either. It may simply be a fork in the road with only one branch, the person driven by an appetite for life, a certain passion, an existential quest, a noble cause, a sense of adventure – or simply a desire to be free and be certain one’s choices are one’s own. 

Not everyone who makes a conscious choice would choose risky living. I had a friend in my 20s, who proclaimed: “I like to be average, I want an average life, an average family, average children, average income.” I was shocked, because I wanted an adventurous life, and everything in it to be the best it could be, as far from average as possible. She too made a profound choice early in life.

She would have never have chosen the life I chose, the moves I made, as I not hers. We both knew what we were after, and that is how we live our respective lives, a little bit mystified why the other would choose to live that way.

“Human lives are composed like music. Guided by her sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress…” writes Kundera. 

A life well lived seems to be relative to how we concretely decide, and thereby define, what is worthy of our life. An impossible passion stretched for – and lost – may be as worthy as a sharing of a mundane daily life for 50 years. My friend’s choice of a quiet and profound embeddedness in the average and predictable was as extreme to me then as my choice of unpredictability and no safety net in pursuit of my passions was to her. 

In reality, most of us live somewhere in between, until or unless something jolts us to a different place, a wake-up call perhaps that brings about transition and a new beginning, or a change of thoughts.

Whether we write our life as a simple ballad with a repeated refrain or as a staggering symphony of movement and scales, and whether consciously chosen or not, we are the composers in charge of the notes we employ. The notes are ordered as we improvise in the business of conducting our lives determining the highs and lows, the heaviness or the lightness. The level of risk or change is controlled by the notes each of us can or want to carry.

This post is a condensed version of an article written for and published in Vision Magazine in 2013 / © Bente Mirow