I am a part of several studies that look at the life of declining older people, [1] and one that tracks changes in the life of an older couple. As a part of those studies, I answer a lot of questions that make perfect sense as part of the study, but that are completely preposterous on their own. The question that serves as the title of this reflection in one of those.

Here’s what I know about my sentiments toward the life I am living. On good days, I love it. This is one of those days. On bad days, I endure it. On intermediate days, I invest in the moments that invite investment and limit the damage, as I am able, of that comes from the others.

Those ways are “how I like my life.” What shall I say in answer to the question on the survey?

As you might imagine, not much management is required for the good moments (similarly, the good days), but in bad moments (or on bad days) there is a discrepancy between what I need to do and what I feel like doing, and I need to choose between what makes sense and what I know will help.

Without that discrepancy, I do what makes sense to me and everything works. With the discrepancy, I need to choose against what makes sense, and choose to do, instead, things that will help. Since I have done this for a long time—much more in recent years—I know what kinds of things will help.

That is important because my way of determining what “helps” is one of the parts of the machine that is broken—well…not functioning at the moment. That means that I cannot do something and see if it helps. I need, instead, to rely on my recollection of “what usually works” and just do that. And then keep doing it and keep resisting the desire to see if it is working.

So I do that. I do the things that have proved helpful in the past and I keep doing them despite the lack of feedback that they are working.

On good days, I use the machine (my life when everything is working) to address my life; to do the things that I think are worthwhile. I choose as many activities as I can that are also pleasurable because I think it is better for them to be both useful and pleasurable than to have to choose. [2] On bad days, I don’t use the machine; it tinker with it. It isn’t in working order, so I do the things that will keep me functioning until it returns to working order. Ordinarily, it does not return to working order as a result of the tinkering. At least I don’t think it does. I think it reboots itself and returns when that process is done.

There is one small problem. It is that I am embedded in a social network and the network works because of the expressed and fulfilled expectations of the members. The expectations—I am going to call them “demands” from here on, not meaning anything aggressive by that term—keep on coming. They do not distinguish between my good periods and my bad ones.

For example, I teach several courses that study what I am going to call, for the purposes of this essay, the narrative logic used by authors of ancient near eastern texts. The essays that will form the basis of these discussions go out of Mondays. The meetings themselves are on Thursdays. For a schedule like that, what does it really mean that I have good days, when I live my life expansively and bad days when I tinker with the machine?

Since the work to be done is constant, it means that sometimes I prepare the materials in Bad Day Mode and sometimes in Good Day Mode, but I always prepare them and distribute them. When, as often happens, I prepare the essays and teach the classes in Good Day Mode, they are spectacularly good. But, as you can see, if you look a couple of sentences ahead, sometimes I prepare in Bad Day Mode (BDM) and teach in Good Day Mode (GDM). At other times, I prepare in GDM and teach in BDM. Both those are…um…suboptimal. But I do them because they are what I have to offer and I do believe seriously in the value of the commitments.

I can, after all, commit to giving them what I have to give. [3] Some days it is spectacularly good. I have had good training and on those days I have a good mind and I have been a teacher all my life. On other days, I rely on the training and the history, but not on the mind, which is somewhere in the rebooting process and is “currently unavailable.”

I would really prefer it if I could do something about how I am in BDM. When I have a headache, I take a couple of aspirin and the headache goes away. That’s how I would like it to be. In the situation I have described, I can take the aspirin, metaphorically speaking, but I can’t know whether it did any good. That’s one of the parts of the machine that isn’t working anymore.

Oh well.

[1] Because I can rattle off the major forms of the Latin noun agricola, I am, as a matter of fact, a declining adult. You have doubts? Agricola, agricolae, agricolae, agricolam, agricola. And in the plural agriolae, agricolarum, agricolis, agriolas, agricolis. Those are the forms appropriate to the nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and ablative cases in both singular and plural numbers.
[2] I am not one of those people who thinks that if it is pleasurable, it is somehow morally suspect.
[3] I suspect that they have BDM and GDM ways of being in those classes and have found ways to cope. Besides, nearly all the people in those classes are old people, like me, and likely have good days and bad days themselves.