Can You Really Live One Day at a Time?

This summer, I reread the novel “Aurora,” by Kim Stanley Robinson, a science-fiction writer whom I profiled a few years ago. Robinson has an ecological orientation, and “Aurora” is basically a book about how we fit into nature. It ends on a beach, with an extended description of swimming in big waves. It’s early morning, and the waves, as they rise, “turn a deep translucent green.” Freya, the novel’s protagonist, has never swum in the ocean, and over the course of the morning she learns how. She discovers that she can dive under a swell, “feel the tug of the wave’s underturn,” and shoot up when it has passed; that she can swim fast up waves that are about to break, then “crash through their crests and fall down their backsides”; and that she can surf, “sliding sideways ahead of the break and across the surface of the wave, which keeps rising up before her, steepening at just the right speed to keep her falling down across it.” This is amazing, like flying, but it can also go wrong: when waves crash down on her before she’s ready, she gets tumbled along the bottom, hitting the sand. Once, she almost drowns.

Freya swims under, over, and along the waves, one after another. Each wave is its own event, difficult or ideal, but collectively they chain together in a soothing rhythm. Sometimes she has to rush to handle a fast set of waves, but such moments are rare; most of the time, she can navigate the wave in front of her, and then turn to the next. This rhythm is part of what makes the beach a special place. It’s a little miraculous that something as powerful as the sea can be, in some sense, predictable.

In ordinary life, by contrast, the flow of time often feels irregular. At painful moments, time can drag with excruciating slowness; when the pressure rises, it accelerates. I find that the end of summer is a period in which time seems to go faster. Days get shorter, the holidays loom, and the months begin to blur. Recently, I sat down with the school calendar to plan meetings for my son’s Lego robotics team, which I’m helping to coach. Almost every week contains some special day—a science fair, a Thanksgiving celebration—that must be prepared for in advance. In her book “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard describes the speed with which the sun can seem to rise and set: it’s as though the world is run by a magician, who says, “Presto chango!” Time trips over itself. In place of steady waves, there’s just a churning sea.

There are strategies for regularizing time, all of which are familiar. One possibility is to subdue it through planning, using calendars, lists, and the like, which encourage us to see the march of time objectively. Another is to try “living in the moment”—a way of giving every unit of time its due. I like my calendars, but they’ve never quite created in me a sense of what David Allen, the productivity guru, called “mind like water”; it’s more like my calendar app is a ticking time bomb, with a countdown I’m hesitant to check. Meanwhile, my attempts to live in the moment, even those abetted by meditation, have felt squishy, uncertain, and evasive. I find that I enjoy life most when it unfolds through regular, manageable units of time that are imposed from without.

Over the past few years, I’ve discovered that my preferred solution is to live one day at a time. In some recovery programs, “one day at a time” is a mantra, expressing the idea that a daunting lifelong commitment to sobriety is best approached in daily steps. This is a little like what E. L. Doctorow said about being a novelist: Writing a novel “is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” But I mean something different—that a day is wavelike. Each one comes forward with its own particular character. You can dive beneath it, or struggle up its face, or try to surf it, or get pummelled by it, but then another day comes, and another. We can usefully organize our experience by approaching it in terms of days. That’s obvious, isn’t it? But it isn’t always easy to do.

To an extent, you can just tell yourself to take it one day at a time. You can literally think, Take it a day at a time—the thought alone does something. But that’s a little like telling yourself to “enjoy life.” It’s good to have a few techniques to sharpen your intention.

Paul Loomans, a Zen monk based in Amsterdam, suggests several in his book “Time Surfing.” For a monk, Loomans seems like a busy guy. He recalls one period, many years ago, when he was running the European Zen Center, in Amsterdam, while also “directing a circus in Switzerland and performing in a show for young audiences that was touring the Netherlands.” He and his wife had small kids at home. Harried and exhausted, he constantly consulted and updated a series of task lists on his computer. Despite this, he was always “terrified” of falling behind. He felt that his life was like a game of Tetris, with new tasks appearing as soon as old ones were cleared. “I was a Zen monk,” he remembers thinking. “Where was my sense of calm, my tranquility?”

Time surfing, Loomans’s life-management method, emerged after he put away his lists. It reverses the advice offered in most time-management manuals. Such books tend to guide us through the creation and maintenance of cleverly designed productivity systems, which we can use to more effectively impose our will upon ourselves. But Loomans argues that, instead of trying to “manage our tasks with our heads,” we should decide what to do next in an intuitive, ad-hoc way. He observes that the difficulty of a task greatly depends on the state of your mind and body while you’re doing it. You might spend a whole day trying and failing to write the introduction to a report, for example, but then make sudden progress the next morning, when you’re well-rested and inspiration strikes. A confrontational phone call can go one way if you make it when you’re feeling down, and another when you’re thrumming with post-workout adrenaline. Cleaning out your spare room could take days, or a few hours, if you’re seized with the right sort of can-do spirit. From this perspective, it makes little sense to decide, in advance, that you’ll do some particular task at some particular time. You should do what you want to do when the spirit moves you, because you’ll do it more effectively.