I have a friend who starts each workweek by taking a bean out of a jar on his desk. The bean represents one week, and the jar has enough to account for every week left between now and the year he will turn eighty-two, which he thinks is a reasonable estimate of how long he might live. He holds the bean in his hand and thinks about the week he just had, including the weekend, which is most often spent with his wife and son. He considers all of the events and decides, simply, if it was a good week or not. As he told me about this ritual, he said with a smile “there are a lot more good weeks than bad ones, and there are fewer beans in the jar than you might think”.

Shortly after I learned about my friend’s jar of beans, I listened to an interview with Atul Gawande, a surgeon whose book Being Mortal explores the goals of healthcare as we approach the end of our lives. In it, he argues that the goal is “not a good death, but a good life —all the way to the very end”, and that too often we are asking the wrong question. Where we so often ask “how can we prolong life?”, we might be better served asking “what are you unwilling to give up in the prolonging of your life?”. Sometimes, for his patients he frames it in the positive, asking simply, “what does a good day look like?”

This is, of course, an enormous and difficult question. In the fullness of our lives a good day might be one spent conquering new challenges at work or exploring a beach town on vacation or wandering the many stalls at the farmers market on a Saturday. It might include feeding the birds or vacuuming the stairs or going on a date. The beauty of being alive is the great variety of experience that can all be called, in one light or the next, good.

But there are seasons and experiences that can refine our focus and help us pin down and even articulate what a good day looks and feels like. Illness, age, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one, falling in love can all focus our attention in powerful ways. When our worlds get big and boisterous, those things bring us back to the still quiet voice, the spirit, or what my family has come to call “our deep knowing”. They help us recenter on the base notes of meaning, purpose, and joy, which course powerfully but often imperceptibly around us.

I’m grateful to be observing and experiencing many of those clarifying events all at once. Part of what drew me to the interview with Dr. Gawande is my daily witness to my grandparents and parents as they collaborate to create good days. I’m so fortunate to still have all four of my grandparents, but as they each live out the final stages of embodiment, “good days” take on new meaning, and fresh urgency. I see them all trying to faithfully live this season, even as the gravity of years makes taking a walk, sharing a meal, and enjoying a conversation more and more difficult.

For my parents especially, I see the challenge of occupying the middle-generational space: grieving their parents and wondering at how to navigate a world without mom and dad while entering a new season themselves which requires not so much retirement as reinvention, all while participating in the rapidly blooming lives of their children.

As one of those children finding love and being swept up in the bursting forth of spring, I am struck by how few beans are in my own jar. I pulled a few grey hairs from my head this week and am seeing with fresh eyes how fleeting our lives really are. Interestingly, this has taken new form for me as I have fallen in love, because as cliche as it sounds, no number of weeks could possibly be enough to spend with this man. I want every minute, every hour, every day, every year I can get with him. When I think about a good day, it is with him, doing anything. I didn’t expect the joy of falling in love to call forth such aching at my own mortality, but it has, and I am grateful for the way it’s made each moment of living so much more precious.

Thankfully, we don’t need the big moments of falling in love or embracing the closing of our own stories to see our lives with great focus. Very non-poetically, I am having my left ACL repaired on Wednesday. It’s a routine procedure with an excellent prognosis, but in this strange lead up to surgery, every step without crutches feels like a precious gift. I know that walking, showering, dressing, preparing food, going out with friends is all about to get significantly (though temporarily) more difficult. That knowledge makes simple things more magical.

It’s okay and necessary for our lives to get full and wide and boisterous, and for us to invest in and experience things that wouldn’t make it into our “ideal day”. Being alive is to reach and stretch, but I am increasingly grateful for the stories and experiences that help me recenter on the deeper spaces of my heart and life. I value those things that bring me back to the base notes, back to the better questions, and on to many more good days.

Ansley Kelly

Ansley Kelly (’16) makes her home in Rochester, NY, where she delights in short, sweet summers spent sailing and long winters spent skiing at her favorite mountain. Between outdoor adventures, you can find her buying books more quickly than she can read them and indulging in mid-morning naps. She works for Wegmans Food Markets where she finds purpose and joy in feeding her community and the wider world.