Heroes Not Zombies

And what is life? An hourglass on the run
A mist retreating from the morning sun
A busy bustling still repeated dream.
It’s length? A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought. 

John Clare’s poem, What is Life? begins with an hourglass, the image of the sands of time constantly running. You can’t help thinking “running out”. A life is short, something we humans inescapably know. We know we are mortal, and we know none of us will have an expectation of more than a couple of handfuls of decades. We try not to think about that, but maybe if we do stop and think about it, maybe because we have a brush with death, we change. We change our priorities and put procrastination off until another day.

Then he describes a dawn, the mist disappearing in the face of the rising sun, because we experience life as a series of days, one after the other. Life is rhythm, cycles, seasons.

For most of us, most of the time, we fill these days with busyness, with habits and routines, rushing from morning to night on autopilot….a bustling, still repeated dream. This is the zombie state I chose for the title of my blog. It’s too easy to miss a life because we fill it with busyness, automatic, unthinking busyness.

Is the unexamined life worth living?

Clare gives us the answer by asking the question “It’s length?” and answering by getting us to focus on “a minute’s pause, a moment’s thought”. This is the “right here, right now” advice, the call to the present, the prod to wake up and become aware, to be more consciously present in this very moment.

That’s a surprising answer to the question about the length of life, but I think it’s a good one. Because the length of a life is affected by its depth.

When we wake up from our automatic zombie state to author our own, unique story, with ourselves as the hero, the main subject, then life becomes richer, more satisfying and more meaningful.

It becomes a full life, a life of constant becoming….evolving, growing, developing into maturity, into flourishing and fruition, always experienced in a present moment.