Are You Choosing Alive Time or Dead Time? Lessons from Nature and the Stoics
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been walking around Folkestone and marveling at how nature just keeps going.
The tulips here are so red and lush and full of life. The birds are singing, the sun is shining, the waves keep crashing as they always do.
They don’t pause when there's a pandemic or when there's any other type of crisis in the world.
We can learn from them.
Subscribe to the Postcard Academy (Click a button below. It's Free)
I’ve mentioned before on the Postcard Academy podcast that I’m into history and I’ve visited some of the concentration camps, and death camps, in Poland and Germany.
And every single time I've gone to one, the weather has been so perfect it feels almost blissful. Warm breeze. Blue sky. Leafy trees and a sun so bright it hurts your eyes.
What sticks with me is the birds chirping.
When you arrive at these camps, you almost expect them to be black and white. Bleak and cold. But they’re not.
And when the birds keep singing, and I think, “Don't you know what happened here? I wonder if they sang during the war. During death marches and forced labor and evil experiments. And then I hope that they did. I hope they gave the victims trapped behind the fence a little piece of normalcy by continuing on.
It's shocking to me how fast things can change. How fast we can bounce back.
Look at the children born to the children who survived the Bosnian War in the ’90s, or the kids in China being raised with technology in cities, whereas one or two generations ago, their family lived in poverty on a rural farm. They don’t relate to the hardship of previous generations, and part of that’s good and part of it’s not.
One thing that is important is resilience and hope.
It’s common now, prevalent even, to see people post, “It’s OK to not be OK” on social media.
And that's true. It's okay to have down days and to be upset about the way things are. None of us want to be locked up in our house. It's okay to not be okay and to feel that for awhile.
But if we wallow in that negativity for too long, that doesn't mean we're going to get extra days in our life, right? We're not going to get these months back. We're not going to get bonus months at the end of our life because we survived the COVID-19 lock down.
I see some people shout, “There are no silver linings!”
I have a friendly reminder for these people: you aren’t biding time right now. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. This is your life.
“Every day you spend in misery is another day you will never get back.
”
This is worth repeating. There are no bonus days. I’m seeing a lot of people saying that everything is on hold right now. But it’s not. Life is marching on. Your life is marching on, and you can decide whether this is Alive Time or Dead Time.
Author Ryan Holiday has a podcast called the Daily Stoic. Lately, he’s been talking about Alive Time versus Dead Time, something writer Robert Greene told him about. According to him, we can spend our time in one of two ways, passively (Dead Time), where we’re just zoning out and letting life happen to us, and actively (Alive Time), where we’re learning, trying new things, and consciously choosing how to spend our time.
One of my favorite sayings is, “Don't ask why this is happening to me, ask why this is happening for me,” or else you're just letting life happen to you, falling into victimhood.
We have more control over our life than that. At least over how we react to things.
As the Stoics said, we can't control what's going on in the world, but we can control how we react to it.
I've always been casually interested in Stoicism, and since going to Athens, Greece, the philosophy’s birthplace, I’m keen to do a deeper dive.
The stoics had emotions, but they didn’t let them rule their life. They were mindful of the experiences they were going through and acted conscientiously. If anything, they loved and appreciated life more than anyone.
We can’t control the chaos swirling around the pandemic. What we can do is be here now and not just make the most of it, but actually try to enjoy this time, whether we are on our own or in a house full of people running around.
This is our time to reset. To think about what really matters. To consider how we want to spend the rest of our lives.
You'll never have this day again. Will you choose Alive Time or Dead Time?
Ready to start your own podcast?
I love helping fellow freedom lovers build their brand and business, connect to their global community, and grow their influence through the magic of podcasting.
If you found this article useful, please share it, and subscribe to the Postcard Academy podcast. Each week, expats and adventurers share their insider travel tips on the best food, nightlife, and cultural experiences in the most interesting places around the globe. I’m your host, Sarah Mikutel, an American who's spent the last 10 years living in, and traveling around, Europe.