I awoke this morning with the oddest words echoing through my head. They were playing, over and over, as if their importance was so intense that my mind was determined to etch them into the walls of my brain.
“You can’t delegate your life.”
In my sleepy state I felt they made perfect sense. Of course you couldn’t delegate your life! How silly to even think you could. To delegate is to choose someone to act for you, and how can you choose someone to live your life? Impossible.
And then I began to awake. Each step toward consciousness brought me closer to the realization that the statement was not quite as simple as I had first thought. When an epiphany finally slapped me fully awake I knew what the statement meant.
There are times I do delegate my life. With every television show I watch, every book I read, every video game I play, I delegate my life to their creators. Because you see, while I am watching, reading, and playing, I am not actively living. I am passive. I am in a life that is not my own, a life someone else created.
Now, before you get all huffy and say reading is good for you and an occasional game or TV show never hurt anyone, let me say I agree. Entertainment, in small doses, is great! It is necessary. It serves a very important purpose in our lives to help us de-stress and relax.
But only in small doses. As soon as the pursuit of entertainment makes us forget to actually live, we’ve delegated away our lives.
I’ve seen it happen time and time again. I don’t know what causes some people to get caught up in passivity. Maybe they are tired, or bored, or lazy, or even afraid of life.
All I know is that now that I’ve gotten the message, I have to live it.
You can’t delegate your life.
Living is doing.