When I was a kid, I chewed my chocolate because I thought I could enjoy it faster. Once I learned you could let it melt on your tongue, I tried. I ended up crunching through that poor square of delight anyway. I’ve never been good at slowing down to enjoy the moment.

I’ve always been guilty of that part of myself. I watch people around me relish the slow bliss of the warm chocolate spreading around in their mouth. But for me the same thing is tantalizing.

No matter how hard I try to slow down, I always end up just wishing I could move on to the next thing, and then I get pissed that I can’t enjoy the thing I’m trying to enjoy, and then the fact that I got upset about not being able to enjoy the thing I was trying to enjoy infuriates me, and I then I just want to scream because it’s simply too much to try and hold all of that in my poor little noggin at once and all because I couldn’t even wait for the whole square of chocolate to melt before crunching what was left of it.

Breathe.

Because I’m human, I’ve had to learn how to catch myself before actually yelling at the void. And I do. Generally. These days I’m pretty at peace with this tendency. I just allow myself to enjoy the piece of chocolate in whatever way pleases me that time I put it in my mouth. The fact that I’m eating chocolate is a good enough thing, and adding pressure to enjoy it a certain way ends up robbing me of actually having a good time eating the damn treat (as described above).

Clearly, I’m disposed toward submission of instant gratification. If anyone has found a way to not be, or is not disposed as such, please let me know your secrets. What I find myself being frustrated with is the way this tendency significantly interrupts other parts of my life.

The frustration arises because hidden in the cost of flitting desire is focus. Deep inside me (and potentially everyone) is a need to be able to look back on one’s life at the end of it and say to yourself, “what a thing of beauty that was.”

For a long time I’ve told myself that the answer to that question is to be able to point to something specific and say, “look at the beautiful thing I created.” And since those kinds of things usually take master craftwork, without focus, I’ll never be able to pass on satisfied that I truly did it.

This is horrific. The thought that I would die unsatisfied is the root of my anxieties. It keeps me up at night. It paralyzes my decision making. I react to the whole deal with avoidance, and then a different kind of downward emotional spiral.

However, lately, I’ve been reflecting on something that I first heard at a retreat last year. Unexplainably, it came to mind a few weeks ago and hasn’t left. I don’t remember the quote verbatim, but the vibe of the idea was that to live is to create. That each tiny decision we make is an act of creating the moment we are stepping into.

I’m sure I heard this before that retreat, but for whatever reason that time it struck me in a way to keep bouncing around the icky gray matter of my brain for 15 months. In that time, I’ve been wrestling with two aspects of this framework.

We can still mess it up. Not every decision we make leads toward beauty. It’s likely actually easier for it to not, and knowing the outcome of those decisions ahead of time is an unrealistic expectation. To wake up each day with the power to either sow beauty or pain (and sometimes both) is an immense responsibility that we all carry.

On the flipside, the unbridled possibility that we each carry with us is, I find, an incredibly freeing way to operate. I’m doing my damndest every day to plant the seeds of beauty, and even if my harvest isn’t much, I’ll know that I did my best in pursuit of something truly wonderful.

Clint Wilson

Clint Wilson (‘23) graduated from Calvin with an official degree in philosophy and unofficial degree in outdoor rec. They currently live in Denver and are working remotely for an LSAT prep company. You’ll likely find them slowly jogging a trail, belaying their wife up some rocks, or reading beneath a heap of blankets.