Ernest Hemingway, in a moment of indecision, and emotional distraught, before he turned his shotgun against himself, wrote this:
” In our darkest moments, we don’t need solutions or advice. What we yearn for is simply human connection—a quiet presence, a gentle touch. These small gestures are the anchors that hold us steady when life feels like too much.
Please don’t try to fix me. Don’t take on my pain, or push away my shadows. Just sit beside me, as I work through my own inner storms. Be the steady hand I can reach for, as I find my way.
My pain is mine to carry, my battles are mine to face. But your presence reminds me I’m not alone in this vast, sometimes frightening world.
It’s a quiet reminder that I am worthy of love, even when I feel broken.
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So, in those dark hours when I lose my way, will you just be here?
Not as a rescuer, but as a companion.
Hold my hand until the dawn arrives, helping me remember my strength.
Your silent support is the most precious gift you can give.
It’s a love that helps me remember who I am, even when I forget.”
Yet, the remarkable thing about Ernest is that he has found time to do the things most men only dream about. He had the courage, the initiative, the time, the enjoyment to travel, to digest it all, to write, and therefore, to create…
As he wrote:
“To stay in places and to leave, to trust, to distrust, to no longer believe and believe again, to care about fishes, the different winds, the changes of the seasons, to see what happens, to be out in boats, to sit in the saddle, to watch the snow come, to watch it go, to hear rain on the tent, to know where I can find what I want.”
“To watch the snow, rain, grass, tents, winds, changes of season . . . To talk, to come back and see your children, one woman, another woman, various women, but only one woman really, some friends, speed, animals . . . courage, co-ordination, the migration of fishes, many rivers, fishing, forests, fields, all birds that fly, dogs, roads, all good writing, all good painting, the principles of revolution, the practice of revolution, the Christian theory of anarchy, the seasonal variation of the Gulf Stream, its monthly variation, the trade winds, counter currents, the Spanish bull ring, cafes, wines, the Prado, Pamplona, Navarra, Santiago de Compostella, Sheridan, Casper, Wyoming, Michigan, Florida, Arkansas, Montana.”
Hemingway wanted a life filled with excitement, drama, and real interest, and understood that those qualities wouldn’t just happen — they had to be intentionally planned for and created.
It’s a secret to good livin’ that commonly goes unrecognized. Even those who plan out their work days, don’t think of planning out their leisure time. Folks head into the weekend without any idea of what they’d like to do with it, and end up piddling around the house, surrendering to the inertia of television, and feeling restless come Monday that they let another 48 hours of potential fun slip away. Or they take trips without a real itinerary in mind, spend the days a little aimlessly, and return home feeling like they could have made more of their rare vacation time.
Plotting your “off hours” can help you make much more out of them.
It doesn’t mean scheduling out each hour of your evenings or weekends, nor carrying around a clipboard of activities on your vacation, and continually checking your watch to keep yourself moving between them. It doesn’t rule out flexibility, changing plans, and taking unforeseen detours. It doesn’t even necessarily require planning too far ahead.
Rather, it’s as simple as having an idea for an activity you want to do and a new restaurant you want to try before the weekend starts. Try to pick one adventure to do on Friday, and kill it over the weekend… because most people without a pre-set plan — tend to fritter away the weekend without doing much of anything except watching Netflix ad nauseam.
Planning your leisure time is also as simple as spending 20 minutes each night you’re on vacation, looking at travel sites or books, and choosing activities you’d like to do the next day. That way in the morning, you’re ready to hit the ground running.
It’s also a matter of planning those trips, period. Turning those “We ought to do that someday” thoughts into reality.
It’s worth generating a list of all the things you love and love to do, just as Hemingway once did. But that’s not a bucket list. It is a to do list. Then think about how to get more of them in your life more frequently. Then, you know how to write them down in a emotionally grappling cascading list, and thus create a plan to make it happen.
Don’t leave your “living-time” to chance.
As Hemingway said:
“Never regretted anything I ever did. Only regret things I didn’t do.”
Yours,
Dr Churchill
PS:
Sadly nobody was there for the great man at the day of his black dogs… in Ketchum Idaho, back on July 2nd of 1961.
Why would someone who is called, the greatest writer of his century, a man who had a zest for life and adventure as big as his genius, a winner of the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, a soldier of fortune with a big estate and a log-home in Idaho’s Sawtooth Mountains, where he lived & hunted during the winter, an apartment in New York where he did his publishing business, an offshore rig he used all Spring, to fish the Gulf Stream from Havana, in Cuba, where he had a beautiful villa, many friends sharing his passion for black rum, cigar rolling mulattas, jungle hunting, and escapism — chose this form of escape?
Hemingway traveled a lot, all over the world, first as an expat in Europe, and in Spain’s Civil War, where he got more PTSD than most combatants, because he was a sensitive soul, an empathetic, and loving heart. Yet in the years following his evacuation from Barcelona in the last boat — he never forgot the horrors, and when many years later, he spent time in his pied-a-terre at the Ritz in Paris, or his suite at the Gritti in Venice, always felt that he did not deserve the quite platitudes of his seemingly long & solid marriage, or the adoration of his many loyal & good friends, his big progeny, his girls and grandkids, and maybe that’s why he put a shotgun to his head aiming to kill the biggest game there is…
Hemingway shot himself in the head, a day and a half after returning home from the hospital, in Idaho. Maybe he was not happy with the service, or he just followed his father and grandfather in the manly way of exiting the mortal coil at the time of his choosing…
Yet, while we’ll never be able to pinpoint exactly why he killed himself, it’s clear Hemingway suffered from physical and mental deterioration, in the years and months leading up to his death, and seems to have been quite out of sorts, at the time he pulled the trigger – he certainly lived life to its fullest and he sucked the marrow out of that awfully big bone.
He fully fished his sea, till either he was exhausted or there were no more fish in the sea…
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