The Beached Margin, Wadsworth, 1937
One of the happiest days I’ve had on this gap year was walking in Cordoba. I went to Lidl, and bought a bag of cherries, two peaches and some almond chocolate. I walked from there into the juderia (Jewish Quarter), through the cobbled backstreets, white plaster buildings with blue shutters, under the hanging baskets of flowers that form Cordoba’s famous patios. I listened to a couple of episodes of The Rest is Politics, and music. I walked for five or six hours. On my way back, the sun set over the bridge onto the Mezquita, the candy striped castle that marks the edge of Cordoba. The light caught the ruins in the middle of the water. A busker started playing Elton John. I sat and listened. I felt perfectly, utterly content.
A large part of this gap year has been the pursuit of Good Days like this. I plunged into this as soon as I started travelling, repeating to myself like a mantra the phrase ‘want not should’. For most of the day, I did what I wanted to and only if I wanted to do so. It was surprising what this showed me. That I like high intensity exercise only intermittently, but I love dancing almost always, and (weirdly) enjoy a spot of yoga. I noticed that I did not touch the philosophy books I’d brought with me, but (even more weirdly) that I loved learning a new language. That I had an almost vampiric desire to be outside, and I liked painting, writing, and reading the news.
For a long time, first because I was hurtling through to the next thing, and next because I was so lost in my own wallowing, I’d forgotten to listen to what it was I actually wanted to do. Once I took away the ‘should do’s’ (exercising, manic phone calls and socialising to keep a hold of friends, learning to keep sharp), and the displacement ‘break’ activities that sat between them (TV shows, mindless scrolling, snacking), I suddenly had an awful lot of day - and I had to work out what it was I actually, really liked doing.
For me, this has formed a recipe for a Good Day - shown me the constituent parts needed to build a day that I finish feeling happy. In no particular order - a Good Day includes:
Being outside
Reading the news
Making something
An interesting conversation
Some form of movement
Learning something
The Bare Minimums (enough food, enough sleep, co-operating hormones, absence of a hangover)
What is interesting is that there are some things that are not on that list - that I do not need to have a good day, but that are - nonetheless - important to me. These are things like:
Helping people
‘Proper’ exercise
Work
Partner/ significant other
Speaking to friends
And what is slightly alarming is that each of these are required as ingredients for what I take to be a Good Life - the sort of life that I would be proud of having lived:
Helping people and making a positive impact on the world - corny, but true and definitely requires helping people
Physical prowess - I would like to have done a marathon/ Iron Man/ play hockey at a decent level - all of which will require ‘proper exercise’ and mean doing slightly more than my current ‘walks and yoga’ regime
Career - I do want to have a job at some point. And a proper-make-a-difference-wield-some-influence-on-things kind of job. Which will probably require work.
Love - Caveat. I would be okay living the rest of my life single. I’m lucky enough to have met some really cool bad-ass single woman in my time, who live great lives, and have made singlehood infinitely preferable than anything other than a bloody good relationship. But I’m a romantic and in an ideal world - at the moment - I would still like to find a partner/ significant other at some point.
Friends - it seems very odd that I don’t need to speak to friends to have a good day. Because my friends are ridiculously, absurdly, dizzyingly important to me. I could easily live single, but I could not bear to live friendless. Nonetheless, I can get by not speaking to friends and still have a good day.
So one of the big things I’ve been thinking about a lot this gap year is the relationship between Good Days and Good Lives. Does one come before the other? Is a Good Day a Good Day because it forms part of a Good Life? Or is a Good Life one that is made of Good Days and nothing more?
For a long time my ‘Good Days’ and ‘Good Life’ have matched up well. Not very cool, but I can remember talking about doing PPE at Oxford at the age of about 10. Doing well at school and university all formed a part of my idea of a Good Life. But, fortunately, doing well at school and university involved a lot of what makes up my Good Days. I’m a massive nerd who likes learning, who knew that to learn well she had to spend some time exercising, being outside, and having a social life. So my Good Days (for the most part) dovetailed very neatly with my Good Life. Which was - in retrospect - bloody lucky.
This allowed me to build quite an illusory idea of myself - as someone who is constantly striving for the Good Life. I moved in circles with people who could perform quite phenomenal feats of self-deprivation - runners who would say no to nights out for 5am training, E&Mer’s who could lock themselves in a library for 17 hour days, rowers who willingly drank beetroot juice. People who sacrificed Good Days for a Good Life all the time. I kidded myself that I was one of them too - masochistic, laser focused on what I wanted to get out of things, and able to leave everything by the wayside in pursuit of that goal. I liked this story of myself. It gave Steve Jobs, intense banker, I-just-got-out-of-my-4am-cryochamber-vibes. Someone who didn’t believe in FUN because the GOAL came first.
But in reality, I’m a little bit softer. I really need Good Days. I found this out last year, when my happy coupling of Good-Days and a Good-Life fell apart, in a corporate job that didn’t seem to involve the things I like, nor leave enough time to do them outside of it. It turns out that I need to spend a decent chunk of my time doing things I like if I am going to be happy - I can’t put all my immediate happiness on the back burner in pursuit of a longer term goal. I’m not a 100% Good Lifer after all. The cryo-chamber just isn’t for me (unless I can watch Ex on the Beach in it).
So, given that Good Days cannot be wholly at the mercy of a Good Life, I’m having to rethink the relationship between the two. I need to work out what importance to give Good Days in their own right.
I’m not willing to make Good Days the be all and end all, because I don’t think a Good Life is the same as one that is made solely of Good Days. At least where my preferences are concerned, living a series of Good Days is a recipe for a phenomenal tan, lots of esoteric interests and spending my retirement in a small bedsit searching for the cheapest meal deal. A Good Life requires some not-Good Days, both because projects may require deferred gratification, and also because bad days are an important part of a life. The days you lose people you love, when things you work at fail spectacularly, when you experience a white-hot anger - all form part of a proper life, a Good Life - but they will not be Good Days.
So neither can be defined wholly in terms of the other. There’s a trade-off between the two, a level of ‘Good-Dayness’ and a level of ‘Good-Lifeness’, and a modus vivendi where the two will be best balanced.*
So where have I got to? The answer is mealy and dissatisfying and incomplete. Sorry. But as someone who wants to live a Good Life, but also needs Good Days, I think I have three things that I’ll be changing in my approach to Good Days. The first is accepting that there is a minimum amount of the Good-Day approach I’ll always need to include. Without some Good-Day-Thinking, periods are remembered in Life as being pleasureless, and then Life isn’t Good. The second is that Good-Day and Good-Life double-ups should be doubled-down on. If something ticks both box’s, do it as much as you can. For me, this is writing, learning and exercise - things that both give me joy as I do them, and help form things I want in life. Finally, to actively notice the character of longer stretches of time. I’m never going to remember every day that passes. But I can notice good periods, keep an eye on the density of Good Days before I forget them. In doing so, I can translate some of the Good Days into the story that I tell myself about what my life has been, can remind myself that they have existed, can appreciate them even if only as a composite.
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Update on travels: Left Mumbai and arrived in Jodhpur, where I’ll be spending the next month doing corporate fundraising and grant applications for a women’s shelter. The craziest thing about India is the roads. It’s a horn-honking, heckling hectic maelstrom, with tuk-tuks and motorbikes careening every which way across the road.
The oddest thing is crossing. Unlike in Vietnam, where you step out, and in the UK where you expect someone to stop, India has an odd middle ground - you step out but with the knowledge that people will only stop if they really really have to. So you end up a little like a large stick making its way down a river, getting caught on rocks. You have to let the pressure build up on the edge of each lane until you really have to move. I’ve become a little shadow, tailing any other crossers who seem to be much braver than I am.
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*Part of the trickiness in working out what the relationship between a Good Day and a Good Life comes from how Good Days seem to switch. When you’re in it, a Good Day is wonderful. It’s there - right in front of you - and everything is sunshine and rainbows and butterflies. It’s very much there, very obvious, sort of presses in on you with its Good-Day-Ness. Sitting with a glass of wine, maybe mentioning what a nice day, going to sleep pleased, it seems madness to want to do anything else. But after you have had the Good Day, and after some days - good or bad - what happens to the Good Day? It becomes something that you have to take on trust. For example, I know that I have spent most of this year feeling very happy. But of the 253 days that have passed, I can probably remember things that have happened on maybe a third of them. Overall, I have to content myself with the knowledge that these Good Days have existed, even if I can’t point to them. So, when weighing up the importance of Good Days against a Good Life, it’s important to remember the former is changing form even as it sits on the scales.