I'm interested in the limits of the human experience. Where do they lie? How do we even begin to formulate an answer to that question?

Let's be a bit more precise. We know there are some seemingly untouchable limits which constrain our experience as a human being. As of yet we have not circumvented death, ill health, or suffering in general. In addition, there are certainly factors beyond our control which influence the direction of our lives to some indeterminate degree. But it isn't worth worrying about these things, really, since we have no control over them.

So what, then, do we concern ourselves with?

It seems to me that we should concern ourselves solely with our day-to-day, hour-to-hour "performance." And I don't particularly like that word - it makes me think of Taylorism, like I have some impulse to reduce human beings to their raw productive output, but I don't mean it like that. "Performance" is not governed by some capitalistic or any other paradigm. It's more subjective than that.

Free will debate aside (and that is a fairly large aside, but what can one do?), there is in theory nothing stopping a human being from spending every waking moment performing some activity which benefits their life - materially, spiritually, creatively, or otherwise. Imagine this is our utopia: a world in which we are all free to engage in the most fulfilling and beneficial activities all the time. Now of course, in reality, we all have obligations which cause us to suffer: work, relationships, and the whole gamut of human activity comes with baggage, anger, and despondency. But I think a situation where there is absolutely zero room to engage in fulfilling, "beneficial" activity is rare - perhaps enslavement would fit that definition. I assume the reader is somewhere between our utopia and enslavement.

There is, therefore, some opportunity for us to improve ourselves, whatever that means. And yet we often fall short of seizing this opportunity - we waste time on things that don't help us. Why is that? The obvious answer is that we aren't good at recognizing which activities are good for us and which are bad. Yet I'm suspicious of this idea. Imagine picking someone off the street and asking them how many times a week they think they should go to the gym, and then asking them how many times a week they actually go to the gym. Do you believe that for most people, the numbers would be the same? I doubt it.

I think most people know what they ought to be doing - or at least have some approximate idea of what they ought to be doing. And there's that Patton quote - “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.” I think this is a good quote. We don't necessarily need a perfect plan, we need to start taking steps in the right direction.

I like to think of life as a series of moments. In each moment we have some level of control over ourselves. And a day, a week, a lifetime amounts to the entire sequence of those moments and the actions we performed within them. Simply put: in this moment, we have the opportunity to act skilfully and, equally, the opportunity to act unskilfully. The beauty of it is that we can always catch ourselves in our unskilful moments, stop for a moment, and reassess.