Life on Hold

Everywhere you look nowadays are books and articles encouraging readers to live life to the fullest. We’re instructed to make a “bucket list” and get started crossing the items off. We’re told to live in the moment, to dream big, to celebrate ourselves, to enjoy simple pleasures. There are slogans like “Today is the first day of the rest of your life,” and “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” to shake us out of our stupor.

In one article I read, a woman was packing up her mother’s things, getting ready to move her into a nursing home. Inside a bureau, she found the gifts she’d given her mother over the last few years—a beautiful nightgown, a scented candle, luxurious bath towels—still wrapped in tissue paper. “Mom,” she asked in bewilderment, “why didn’t you use the gifts I gave you?”

“I was saving them,” her mother answered.

I thought about that a lot. Saving them for what? For when life’s perfect? For a magical future day that never arrives?

At first, I felt pretty good about myself regarding this issue. I don’t have any items stashed away for later. I burn the candles I buy. We don’t have any towels I’d call “luxurious,” but we do use the ones we have. I do have wedding china on display in the china cabinet, but I get it out for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and other important family events.

But then I realized that there is one item that I buy and then invariably put off using—new running shoes. I wait until my current pair’s about worn out, order a new pair, and when they come in, I let them sit in the closet. Sometimes for months. I mean, they’re so clean when they’re new, so shiny and white. So there they sit, and day after day I look at them, until finally I admit that my old shoes are causing my feet or my knees to hurt and realize how stupid it is to have good shoes that I refuse to wear.

Reluctantly, I get them out of the closet and put them on, lace them up, and head out the door. And after a day or two, even sooner if it’s rainy, they don’t look so new anymore. And I survive.

Maybe there’s some deep Freudian thing going on here.