“The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be able to have multiple “first” things. People and companies routinely try to do just that.”
- Greg McKeown from Essentialism
Defining the limits of achievement
McKeown correctly identifies the ever-present urge to pursue many “priorities” and “prioritize” many categories in life. In this, we overestimate our abilities. Existing as a mind confined to a brain and its appendages is not an incidental occurrence but rather defines us as bodily creatures.
No matter how lofty our aims may rise, we remain these lowly creatures with bodily needs. The constraints of sleeping and eating, moving and feeling should not be viewed as obstacles to productivity but aspects of our being that deserve our respect. As they say in the tech world, “It’s a feature not a bug.”
Given all these constraints, there are severe and insurmountable limitations to the shape of our abilities. Our lives are less a foray into many arenas and more a singular trajectory of being. This is not to say that man is incapable of significant and astonishing accomplishment; many people have managed truly impressive feats. On closer examination, we are likely to find that these feats come to the rare genius and to the ordinary person of exceptional habits. The latter is more interesting since, realistically, you are not one of the geniuses.
For these ordinary mortals who master habits of excellence, the more likely path of success is within the boundaries of bodily existence instead of forcefully subduing the need to sleep, to eat, to commune with fellow man. With all these time-consuming quotidian enterprises, understandably our room for concerted effort in the realm of ideas is narrow. Yet, we are told to pursue many “priorities,” as if we have the option.
Defaulting to a priority
McKeown is right that having many priorities results in not having a defined priority at all. However, the lived experience of this state is often that there is a default priority, whether recognized or not. While a father may state emphatically that his family is “one of his priorities,” if work beyond necessity takes him away from said family, his statement is a wish and not a reality.
It’s not that fathers who enjoy work cannot make their families the priority, it’s just that one must flow from the other. The man who loves his wife and children will in fact provide for them; his love for them will not be an abstraction but a lived experience of coming to know them day-in and day-out.
In our time, many fall into the error of prioritizing what is outside, theoretical and not particular. A coffee shop intellectual raved against the supposed crimes of corporations without specificity, haranguing nameless, faceless entities of mind control. He was taken aback at the suggestion that what has greater import in his life is how he conducts himself in relation to his roommate. Many people, like the disgruntled caffeine thinker, claim to be deeply concerned with kindness and justice, yet these are not the priority in their lives they proclaim them to be if they remain in the abstract, detached from flesh and blood of daily living.
As the oft-quoted passage from Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life goes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” She continues, “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order—willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
The schedule of an average day, whether carefully mapped out beforehand or haphazardly experienced as it flies by, demonstrates the priority.
Purity as priority
The recognition of the singular priority of most human life perhaps gives us some insight into the saints, people as varied as can be save their final destination. Perhaps the defining characteristic of the saints ultimately is purity.
In the post-modern obsession with pelvic activity (ironically leading to a time of dwindling interest in the real thing), we tend to focus on the purity of the saints as a matter of sterile virginity. The purity arises not from lack of lust but instead the focused pursuit of Someone greater.
The chasm between the holiness of the blessed and our earthly struggle is immense, but it is for most of us not going to be bridged by one cathartic moment of spiritual renewal. What lies ahead of us is the dull plodding on of ordinary life. This is not reason for weariness but thanksgiving that the work begins in the ebb and flow of our ordinary movement through time and space. How we choose to spend each ordinary Tuesday afternoon moves us closer to or farther from the priority.
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