Forgetting Ourselves
What Memorial Day Teaches About Purpose and Presence
tldr: Memorial Day is a reminder of both big picture purpose and the moment-to-moment experience that make up life and leadership.
Read time: 5 minutes
Hi Timeless Leaders,
We just finished Memorial Day weekend. Unfortunately it’s so heavily commercialized (“Memorial Day Sales!”) and focused on summer BBQs that most of us can go through the whole weekend with no mention of the fallen soldiers we’re meant to honor.
What better holiday to think about legacy, in a non-religious sense, but one that focuses on people who made the ultimate sacrifice for a cause outside of themselves? I’ve never encountered a broad movement to have these conversations, but that’s a big reason why I’ve started Timeless Leader. I think the practice we can build of grounding in purpose and understanding sacrifice for the long-term can make us more aware, thoughtful, and effective in the short term.
At the same time, we’re all just trying to get by, and a 3-day weekend is chance to catch up on things (friends, chores, shopping) that can get lost in the grind.
The Purpose of Our Ancestors
War has existed ever since human beings organized into large groups and squabbled over power and position. As groups grew more complex and eventually formed nation-states, the purpose of conflict and the benefits of victory could be far removed from the individual soldiers marshaled to raise arms for a cause.
We all probably have ancestors who fought and died in war. We don’t all have the benefit of knowing their stories.
I’m lucky enough to have history preserved of several of my ancestors who fought and died as soldiers for the United States.
One of these ancestors was my great-great-granduncle, Edward Stanley Abbot. In 1862 he dropped out of Harvard to join the Union Army. As he was finalizing his decision and communicating with his sister Emily, he wrote the following words:
The only true way to live is to forget ourselves. Self-denial is not enough. Self must be annihilated, ignored. I would as soon think of shrinking back for fear I might lose a limb or my life as of hesitating lest 'my morals' may be impaired...
Since God has given me life and strength to this cause, I must devote my life, consecrate my strength. I must work for it, live for it, die for it. If such happiness should be in store for me, I am happy and proud that I have thought worthy to live in the hour of the nation's agony...—Edward Stanley Abbot, January 5, 1862
A year and a half later, he died from a gunshot wound at the Battle of Gettysburg. He was just 21 years old.
Stanley’s story was preserved in his journals and letters, and twelve years ago my grandmother’s cousin, Quincy Abbot, published these in an incredible volume called From Schoolboy to Soldier.
Quincy passed away 2.5 years ago. I just learned that his wife Zelia died this Memorial Day weekend.
My heart is heavy.
Memory and history are a difficult burden to carry. Meanwhile the clock keeps ticking, and we have to choose what sort of history we will make that our descendants might learn from, benefit from, celebrate, and carry forward.
Fortunately, becoming a soldier is seldom the decision that most of us need to make.
Living in the Moment (Acting without Purpose)
It’s rarely so clear-cut what causes we can throw ourselves into, and few of us will risk death from that decision. We’re almost always better off when we don’t solve problems with war and when we take the time to work through issues peacefully. If we’re fortunate enough to live a full life for many years, we might devote ourselves to more than one cause, to lead and to follow, and one day, see the fruition of our efforts.
We also can’t just grind all the time. What is life, if we never live it?
The math of mortality forces this question into sharp focus.
Oliver Burkeman named his acclaimed book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals based on the calculation that if we live to 80, that’s how much time we have to live.
With new technology and medicine, maybe we’ll live much longer.
But there are also many reasons we could have much less than that (Stanley had a precious 1,080 weeks).
So how do we decide how to use this time? Burkeman says “we’ve been granted the mental capacities to make almost infinitely ambitious plans, yet practically no time at all to put them into action.”
Part of the answer is that we simply don’t. We don’t use all of our time to pursue plans.
Or to put it differently, we don’t use time at all.
Sometimes we must simply experience it.
In his chapter on Rediscovering Rest, Burkeman elaborates:
Taking a walk in the countryside, like listening to a favorite song or meeting friends for an evening of conversation, is thus a good example of what the philosopher Kieran Setiya calls an “atelic activity,” meaning that its value isn’t derived from its telos, or ultimate aim. You shouldn’t be aiming to get a walk “done”; nor are you likely to reach a point in life when you’ve accomplished all the walking you were aiming to do. “You can stop doing these things, and you eventually will, but you cannot complete them,” Setiya explains. They have “no outcome whose achievement exhausts them and therefore brings them to an end.” And so the only reason to do them is for themselves alone: “There is no more to going for a walk than what you are doing right now.”
—Oliver Burkeman, 4000 Weeks, page 156
We can’t constantly treat our experience as something that we make purposeful. Trying to add purpose to activities that are best experienced without purpose can kill the true value of them in the first place.
Sometimes we all need to just take a walk, or meet with friends, or listen to a song without purpose, because that’s the point.
Humanity is not a machine.
Life doesn’t exist in order to end.
Our purpose(s) may thrive when we’re focused, but it’s also fueled when we feed our bodies and souls with the experience of being alive.
3-Day Weekends
Every 3-day weekend presents an opportunity for some atelic activity. Some 3-day weekends — especially Memorial Day — may also carry some larger meaning that can help us connect to our purpose.
Somewhere between these two truths, Stanley’s words ring in my ears, more than 150 years later -
“The only true way to live is to forget ourselves.”
Stanley may have forgotten himself, but I remember.
How do you forget yourself?
When you do - who do you remember?
-Joe
PS. Want to talk about these kinds of tensions with other Timeless Leaders? Consider upgrading your subscription and you can join our private Basecamp calls on the first Thursday of each month. Next call is on June 5th!