From the morning it is stiflingly hot, and by afternoon a downpour falls out of nowhere. I am glad the heat breaks a little, but the air remains heavy. Summer is still summer.
When I roll the word summer around in my mind, something like nostalgia rises up. I remember neglecting vacation homework and running through mountains and fields all day as a child. I remember horror movies on TV during tropical nights when the heat kept me from sleeping. I remember doubling up on a bicycle with friends and pedaling for half an hour to swim in a valley, or shivering with blue lips after hours at the neighborhood pool before eating cup noodles from the stationery shop next door. Scenes like that drift past.
More than ten years have passed since then, and my life has changed a great deal. When I first got my ID card and could legally drink and smoke, I still did not feel much like an adult. But now, every month, as loan interest slips out of my bank account, I begin to understand what adulthood might mean. I moved out. My parents’ names disappeared from my family registry, and I became the head of my own household. Somewhere along the way I got married, and friends say I am now the man of the house. Life really has shifted.
With every year that passes, I find myself rethinking what it means to live. Maybe it began when I first took entrance exams seriously. Back then, I treated living as a process you endure in order to arrive somewhere. Maybe it came from the biographies of great men my mother bought me as a child, or from stories about seniors who “made it” into a Seoul university, or from the glossy, seductive slices of success shown on television.
If you were at school by eight in the morning, you might not leave until midnight. It was tedious and suffocating, but I could stand it. The end was visible, and I had no particular hobbies that made life outside school enjoyable anyway. The monthly mock exam score sheet worked as both carrot and whip. I somehow survived that process of getting into the university I wanted, and by the winter of senior year, after the CSAT, I arrived at the far end of that long patience mostly intact.
When I compare that to now, I ask myself whether I am still living a life that is only a process aimed at some future terminus. There is no shortage of tempting destinations: a good company, a high salary, social standing, a nice car. Strip away the faint vulgarity around them and they are very attractive goals. The promise is simple: pedal hard, and once you get there, life will be happy.
No. It will not.
As long as you keep sacrificing today for some future tomorrow, tomorrow will only be sacrificed for another tomorrow. Even when you think you have reached the station you were aiming for, some new terminal will have appeared. You will never be able to get off the bicycle. You will have to keep pedaling. It is a simple story. If life is going to be happy, that moment has to be today, not tomorrow.
That thought is a familiar cliché whenever people talk about work-life balance, the kind of cry people make when they are on the verge of being swallowed whole by work. The counterarguments are easy enough to find, and in truth that tension is part of why I started writing this in the first place.
There are people whose work is their life and whose life is their work. For them, life is not something work consumes. The two blend naturally into one another. You see that kind of person often among developers. When “what you love” overlaps with “what you are good at” and also with “what makes money,” people say you are fortunate enough to have found a vocation. Personally I think that kind of overlap is tremendous luck. If mine had not aligned as well as it did, I would probably have quit development long ago. Maybe I would be running some sort of shop instead. Who knows.
Still, there is another difficulty in life. A handful of satisfactions born from work and vocation aligning are not enough paint to color an entire life. There are too many tubes in the box. I am not saying that a life painted in a single color is wrong. Plenty of people we call great focused themselves through just a few pigments. Zuckerberg, Newton, people of that order.
But most of us, myself included, do not paint life very well in a single, flat color, and we do not have to. The number of interesting things we want to try far exceeds even a sixty-four-color crayon set. If you sample them one by one like dishes at an all-you-can-eat buffet, most of them will not be what you are best at, and most of them will not make you money. That is when adult life begins to feel heavy.
I have a friend who plays the guitar impressively well. He started in a school band, and now he tackles difficult pieces cleanly and sometimes posts original songs to Facebook. He is not trying to become a professional musician. He simply likes playing and writing. That alone added a color to his life and probably made him happier. There is no need for him to become great through the guitar. My father used to say that life is not something you have to live that fiercely. Someone may become immortal through a century’s worth of classical guitar. For my friend, though, the guitar is simply one way to enjoy his free time.
Rubbing sleepy eyes and rambling after a long break, this post does not really have a neat arc. What I want to say is simple: color your life with as many hues as you can. Wander into different fields as an amateur, without pressure, and make today richer. Do not keep sacrificing today in the hope of becoming great someday. Be happy today. That is the message I need to hear myself. It is a note from the me a few years further down the road to the younger me who spent one day after another burning up today for the sake of some future greatness.