Coasting

I received some of the most meaningful feedback on this blog since I started writing it a decade ago.

“Hello mate. Keep blogging. Always thoughtful and always inspiring. Gives me the occasional prompt that life is for living not for coasting through.”

Aside from being enormously gratifying to know my rambling rouses some life-urgency in a good person, this feedback has a deeper relevance and resonance for me.

At school, I was a ‘coaster’, I was?the?coaster, and many of the interminable bollockings I received from teachers for not doing this or that featured this very term, ‘coasting’.

Before I commit to another rousing ramble, what is coasting?

Coasting is a weird word: it’s a verb, a doing word, about?not?doing something.

Coasting is letting your car roll along in neutral, or riding your bike without pedalling.

Coasting is going, it’s doing, but with nothing behind it, no effort, no drive, no energy – life in neutral.

I was indeed a coaster as a teenager, right into my late teens, as I’m somewhat ashamed to admit.

I coasted through school, never doing a shred more than the barest necessary to avoid bollockings. I coasted through relationships, assuming that relationships with family and friends and partners would sustain themselves independent of any effort. I coasted through health, half-arsing sport whilst eating chip butties on lunch and chain-smoking cigarettes. I coasted through morality, thinking I could do wrong and somehow get away with it. I coasted through life.

For whatever confluence of hard-to-fully-know reasons – but certainly featuring a good family, the noble sport of boxing, university, travelling, and philosophy – I reformed, I stopped coasting, and I started peddling, hard, in a self-determined direction.

Now, I would not be so bold as to say I am not a coaster.

“Hi, my name is Liam Doherty, and I am a coaster…”

I am a recovering coaster. I hear echoes of this old self fairly often, a wee imp in the recesses of my brain, nagging at me to chill out man, take a load off, nothing really matters, cut that corner, yada yada.

And I still coast, often, but I only dare do so once I’ve peddled intensely enough that I can afford to, knowing that coasting is not a sustainable way to go through life, you will lose life-urgency and life-momentum, you will slow down and topple over, becoming a pathetic lycra-clad smear on the pavement.

As a recovering coaster, my angle on life is this: you can do more, and you can be more.

That is the truest thing you will read in this article and possibly the truest thing you will read all week, and it should feel terrifying, liberating, and exciting.

Before you grow old and die, or die before your time as so many do, you have the ability to do more and be more as a human being, as a life.

Precious few things are as gratifying as prompting people to find drive and joy and meaning in their lives, to simply start peddling.

It’s not a straightforward venture to encourage life-urgency – I try and fail with myself often enough. If only it was easy as saying, “Beg your pardon, dear friend, but I would like draw your attention to that deep well of potential lying unnecessarily dormant within you, and that you are in mortal danger of doing an irreversible disservice to reality by allowing it to sit there unrealised, before you die, which you inevitably will.”

Words, however, rarely work to change behaviour (he says, writing words in the hope they do just that).

Communicating that sense of urgency – that we are, in cosmic terms, a flash in the pan, and you may very well be squandering your singular chance of living a full life by coasting along half-arsed in neutral – is difficult.

People need to know and experience this urgency for themselves.

I’m sure you know someone who has had a near-death experience, a cancer scare, a fondness for skydiving, or lost a loved one. Brushing with the blackness of death makes life by contrast appear in all its dazzling splendour, and we recognise why it should be cherished and lived to the very fullest – or else the blackness taints you, which is a tragedy.

Spend with me a moment, this very moment, on this achingly beautiful and once-in-a-lifetime day, a day that occurs only once in infinite eternity, just as your life occurs only once, spend a moment to say to yourself: I am empowered to live and enjoy life as I wish, with all it may throw at me, and I am going to be a better version of myself today, I am going to live life with love and happiness and chirp and vigour.

Life is for living, not for coasting.

And so it follows that my day begins writing these words of positive affirmation – I promise I am not as woo-woo as I sound – before heaving and breathing and bathing with my friends at the pools, then for a swim in the sea, then to the gym, then my first job, then my second job, then coaching at the boxing club, and then play basketball, perhaps another dip…

…before coasting happily to bed :-)