Today is another day, another morning, another routine of peeling my sleepless skin from my sheets. The sun is not up, and it crosses my mind only once that this life is at least some kind of sadistic punishment. I lift the blinds to allow no more light to enter my room besides the street lamp that glares into my bed. My dog is ready for his morning walk and breakfast. I am bracing myself for another day, another morning, another routine. 

Today, I tried something a little differently: I gave myself five more minutes in bed before checking my phone. A moment where I replaced reading text messages with consuming the day’s written meditation on the book I keep optimistically by my bed. A little better. Then I got up, and well, you know the rest.

By the time I get back from my walk, I’d thought of forty-some-odd ways I’ve become a workhorse, which is my nicer way of recognizing the cog I have become in a wider system of attempting to be a person in the world. The kettle turns on, the dog gets fed. Another forty ways come to mind. 

When my coffee reaches my lips, I have already begun working. It's a job that’s far better than physical labour, though my eyes burn and my back hurts by the end of it. I’ll remember but not listen to the call to stretch or drink water. I’ll grow so tired by lunch time that I forget to care about what I’m doing. I’ll once again walk my dog and wonder why the mundanities of life have to be so exhausting. A handful of ‘if onlys’ will cross my mind while I work; moments of brief refuge in fantasy. A few hours will pass and work will end. I’ll feel unfufilled. I’ll walk the dog again.

On my post-work walk today, I’ll see at least two things that remind me that I’m alive, which toggle between the sensation that I should be living more and that it hurts that I am living less (and of course, a dash of admiration). It’ll be a child playing in the snow, or a group of birds clustered in a tree. It’ll be the things that exist as they are that make me feel my skin age just as much as I’ll feel rejuvenated. I will return from my walk only partly changed. I will park my butt on the couch with my laptop to work on my art and writing. I’ll pass the time until I walk my dog once more before bed, once more before I start it over again the next day. I’ll be at least one walk closer to retirement.

If you’re like me, most of your life will live outside of your control, and so things like needing to work will be unavoidable. You’ll shake your fists at the job boards filled with bullshit AI listings. You’ll stress about money and time and love and our arrangements. You’ll wonder why you were treated a certain way. You’ll ask yourself when things will change. Unavoidable, I guess. 

So, your days will be long but your weeks will be short. You’ll resent time for passing, but not more than you’ll resent yourself for not knowing the truths that only time has revealed. We’ll be littered with reminders of our dissatisfaction, and we’ll feel trapped in them. 

A lesson I learned in my early twenties that I failed to commit to in its entirety is the ceaseless pursuit of making myself feel better. I think I talk about it on here a lot, in hundreds of different ways, but they all mean the same thing. I’ll talk about presence, discipline and purpose, commitment and ritual. I’ll talk about finding opportunities for joy and taking them. Some roundabout essays that the notion of carpe diem articulated in only two words. 

Still, somehow, this lesson that holds so much cultural weight is not one I often live by. In fact, I become seized by my day more than my day is seized by me. But this week is slightly different. 

After hundreds, if not thousands of unseized days, I’ve gotten fed up. If this is going to suck, I can at least try to contain the parts of it that suck the most. I can take inventory, and I can maybe try to cultivate something better than the cycle of another day, another morning, another routine. 

This path is the pursuit of something good or my attempt to find or create something meaningful for me. To be clear, I’m not talking about the pursuit of happiness, or the view presented by John Locke, which posits the pursuit of true happiness to be the foundation of liberty.

Let’s be double clear: I’m not going to dwell on the thoughts and beliefs of some 17th-century white guy. I just wanted you to know the distinction between what he’s talking about, the freedom which allows one to pursue happiness, and what I’m talking about, the very small acts of cultivated freedom.

So instead of happiness, which is a fleeting feeling at best, I will talk about the pursuit of something good. Something good could be virtue, as the Stoics would suggest or pleasure as claimed by the hedonists. We could talk about good in terms of ethics, or sensory enjoyment or really just fulfilment. Maybe that’s somewhere in the middle? I’m not sure.

So the pursuit of something good might be something like my small swap I made this morning, opting for a written meditation over my phone. A tiny act of rebellion against my otherwise consistent morning routine. It was a choice for me to make my day better. It was not only the willingness but the actual exercise of will that marked my pursuit. In our small ways, we are truly trying. 

So what I won’t be doing is going on some ‘just do it’ soapbox that involves the wide painted assumption that things can just be done, that there are never any real limitations to the things we do. But I may go on the ‘how can we make it work?’ tirade, which is my newfound mantra, lending to the inquisitive line of thinking that asks how we can make what we have a better experience for ourselves. 

This week I took up a new hobby, one that cost me $20, money I wouldn’t have had without a gift card from my old boss. I restarted my practice of stretching a couple of weeks ago, which I committed to more fully this week. I’m working on reading a book that has taken me forever to read. These are, to me, the process of honouring commitments to myself, which are really just that grabbing life by the balls thing. It’s using what I have and making it work. I cannot quit my job due to the fantasy millions which I may one day encounter miraculously, but I can do this. 

This really is a talk about the art of showing up, for ourselves and others and doing the walk just as much as the talk and as close as we can to the vision. I have been miserable before. I don’t want to be miserable anymore. I’m already poor and tired; isn’t that bad enough?

So, say what you want and be impeccable with your word. This is one of the four agreements introduced by Don Miguel Ruiz and is at least in part about stating something that you actually mean. Say you will show up, and make it work. It does not need to be perfect, but it will need integrity if you want it to stand on its own someday. Mean it. I don’t want to be miserable anymore. Now what?

For now, I will do my best, in as many tiny ways as I can. I’ll be on the hunt for something, and it isn’t this, so why would I become so complicit in it? Why would I focus more on what I don’t want than what I do? I want change, so I guess I’ll have to get the ball rolling on that. 

What I am really talking about is the pursuit of something good, being the ongoing attempt to alchemize the moments of our lives with the materials we have, and the energy we perhaps think we do not have. All we need is enough energy to count on more energy to arrive. Once we use energy to create fulfilment, we dig a deeper well that we can draw from. It will return as we feed it. 

We may seek to challenge the status quo of persistent fatigue and perhaps enjoy a cigarette behind our workplaces on our lunch break. Pleasure. We may become increasingly charitable with our time and resources. Virtue. Or perhaps we lend ourselves to the creative pursuits of our existence, we seek the creation and nurturance of love and our relations and become larger than we are. Fulfilment. 

We do not need to be hindered by the sense that our pursuits require significant access when we can start small. The vision is the end goal, not the beginning. Your life is the pursuit, the chase, the learning how to become that one who receives. You must find as many ways to defy the expectation you have that this experience is eternal. Dig your teeth into the right now, knowing that, like all things, you cannot hold it there forever. Then let it go. Get as much out of this as you can while you venture through your life. 

So the pursuit of something good is this act of defiance, over and over again, and building the capacity to become as resourceful as we can with our time and experiences. I’m only a week-ish in to my new philosophy, so the long-term effects aren’t totally clear to me. But so far, I feel that I am on the pursuit of something good. A new day, a new morning, a new routine.