“Do not waste food.”

Until I learnt — better out than in. Just because it has passed through your intestines, extending the cycle, doesn’t mean it wasn’t wasted.

“Do not waste time.”

Who decides what constitutes a waste of time? How much is too much? How can one person’s formula work for another, perhaps for a few years, but not necessarily for a lifetime? When do I discover what is wasting time for me, and what is using it in a way that creates value?

Wasting time = wasting life. Who is answerable at the end of the day?

And then, when my kind of wastage begins to happen, it becomes playful. Because it is playful, it becomes fun. Because it is fun, I lose myself in it. Hours pass without my counting them. I am simply there. And when I return, I find myself ready for the next step.

This is the difference I have begun to recognise. Some experiences take me to a crest, only to leave me in a trough. The high passes, the depletion follows, and I find myself seeking the next high. Others become stepping stones. They leave me with firm footing, something from which I can take the next step. A sustainable high, if you will. One that builds the will to live, rather than leaving me chasing another reason to feel alive.

Of course, not everything that drains me is a waste. Some things are difficult precisely because they ask something of me. The body knows the difference between being stretched and being depleted, between the effort that builds capacity and the effort that leaves me running on empty. At least, it can begin to tell me when I learn to listen.

What if we began by observing our own lives instead of borrowing someone else’s formula? What if, for a few days, we paid attention to how we feel before and after the things that occupy us? Do they leave us more present, more willing to engage with life, more able to take the next step? Or do we repeatedly need to recover from them? The point is not to assess every experience, but to become familiar with ourselves.

But how do I learn what sustains me if I never allow myself to experience anything beyond what I have been told is right? Sometimes, I have to taste the pleasures of the world until I have had enough to recognise the pleasure I was actually seeking. Otherwise, abstinence can become another borrowed rule. The fox and the grapes come to mind. Have I seen through the illusion, or have I simply decided the grapes were sour because I couldn’t reach them?

For much of my life, I was reluctant to go to sleep. I wanted to extend the day, read something more, do a little more. There was always something left, or so it felt. Today, something is changing. I am beginning to feel ready to sleep, ready to meet another day. I no longer feel I must squeeze everything out of this one before it ends. There is a tomorrow I can meet, and a self I can continue to choose.

Everything has a place, but never at the cost of self. How will I know what love is from within if I have only learnt to give it away? This isn’t selfishness. It is learning to inhabit my own life with enough dignity and respect that my relationships need not be built on my abandonment of myself. Other people’s moods belong to them. What I do with what reaches me belongs to me. I may be affected by the world without making it the measure of my worth.

And what of sacrifice? Life can throw anything at me. I may grieve, struggle, feel helpless, even lose my footing. Dignity does not mean I must never feel these things. It means I can learn to meet them without surrendering the person I am. Not as an ideal to aspire to, but as a way of life.

It’s never too late. Late bloomer? Who decides what’s late? We seem to have a timeline for becoming someone. A childhood and youth spent preparing, followed by decades in which we are expected to establish ourselves, achieve, accumulate and secure our place in the world. And then? Are we to live out the remaining years as though the real business of life is behind us?

What if we have barely begun to discover how to live?

The only hiccup is that there are bills to be paid. I cannot wish away the material realities of life. There are children to raise, homes to maintain, responsibilities to honour. The road less travelled is not for everyone, nor can everyone afford to step away from the road they are on. But must the payment of bills become the purpose of living? Must the whole of life be organised around sustaining the life we have built, leaving little room to discover what else life might be?

For a long time, I thought the body was this five-foot machine that could be set right through proper eating, exercise, chemical compositions and all the right inputs. Get the formula right, and the machine should work. Until I began to see her beyond the limits of physical sight. Until I began to understand that knowing what the body needs and experiencing what it means to be alive in her are not the same thing.

We can know the forecast, explain the conditions, predict the weather to the letter. And still, the first flake of snow can bring us to a standstill. Perhaps there is a difference between knowing about life and actually living it. Between speaking about what is possible and becoming someone who has lived that possibility.

We are connected in ways that extend beyond what we can see. Like a mycelial network, what becomes possible in one part can alter what becomes possible elsewhere. The person I become is not mine alone. It reaches into the lives I touch, into the bloodline that follows. Not because I have set out to become an example, but because a life actually lived leaves possibilities behind.

And perhaps this is what I am beginning to question when I ask what it means to waste a life. Not whether I have made the most of every hour, or whether I have something tangible to show for every day. But whether, in the effort to use my life well, I have actually allowed myself to live it.

Why build something that lasts only a lifetime? What is it that even death cannot take away? The person I become, the possibilities I embody, the life that becomes possible for someone else because I dared to live mine differently.

Tell me, beloved. If I spend my life doing all this, is my life still wasted?

“If you have to ask, you’ll never know. If you know, you need only ask.”

— Helena Ravenclaw, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)