No matter how angry or dangerous or ruined or fearful may seem to be at times in my life, or how awful my despair might be, as long as I am alive, my very humanity insists on challenging me.
It tells me, over and over again at my lowest points, that my life has meaning.
If I could always see or know that the meaning of life is, then I could fulfill my purpose without effort or trouble or self-doubt. If I were sure of the meaning of my life, then I could go ahead and fill my “ultimate purpose” and shed self-doubt and despair.
I am amazed and fascinated to be living in a country where one-half of the people have one set of beliefs and the other half another. There is little or no effort to mediate, reconcile, or soften anybody’s hardening view of the world.
I will confess that I see the “left” and the “right” as two mobs, each one getting angrier and angrier, each one talking only to the other. For me, being human is thinking individually; I hope label ever fits me so tightly that I can’t see the other side or work to understand it.
I can’t accept that half of the people in this country are stupid, or hateful, or ignorant. I suppose it’s possible, but I can’t believe it and I won’t. It would be fatal for me as a writer or a human to think in that narrow way.
I have my beliefs and hope to keep them, but to me, these labels are the hiding place of thoughtless mobs, not a way of thinking, but a way not to think. These fortresses of thought are the antithesis of community or even democracy.
I struggle and battle with them every day of my life, mobs if the mine is easy enough to join, complicated to leave, or move beyond.
If we can’t find a way to talk and listen to one another, then it will become more evident that our idea of democracy has run its course, and some new revolutionaries will come up with another system, for better or worse. I chose freedom, a flawed system, but still the best one around that I know about.
Most human beings believe that life has meaning, or putting it differently; there is no purpose without meaning. I read recently that many suicide messages left behind say that life has lost any meaning or purpose; there was no point in living.
I do not consider my purpose in life is to find a label or ideology and permit it to speak or think for me. I am finding my purpose in life with the Army Of Good, and it is making me stronger and clearer every day.
I dig deeply for my values and beliefs, they are the meal I offer to the world, it might be a good meal or a bad meal, but it’s my meal.
I believe my purpose in life is to discover this meaning for me and live according to it. I think it is to commit small acts of great kindness and practice empathy and compassion.
Much of my purpose still escapes me or eludes me. I would be afraid to be so clear as to know for sure, that strikes of fanaticism and arrogance to me. Am I supposed to be 100 percent certain about why I am here? I doubt it.
I keep asking the same question:
It isn’t w ho should be president or what did some talking head say on TV. It’s much more elemental. Why am I here? What is my purpose? How can I achieve it?
Thomas Merton wrote that the great threat to original meaning is collective thinking, labels like “left” or “right,” nothing more than ways to pigeonhole the other and dismiss what he or she is saying.
“The greatest of disadvantages,” he wrote, is that we are so prone to welcome everybody else’s wrong solutions to the problems of life. There is natural laziness that moves us to accept the most comfortable solutions, the ones that have a common currency in the people and ideologies around us.
We learn our personal and shared destiny by living together with others by talking to them and listening to them. We stop thinking and growing when we only hear our echoes.
Every person has something to live for. Everyone has to think for him or herself.
Recently, I wrote that I am buying treated water in aluminum cans because aluminum can be recycled. One person wrote to say a much better system would be to purchase metal water bottles and keep reusing them (we have three.)
Josiah was more contemptuous: “This is a bizarre way to be “greener.” Why on earth can’t you, you know, do something radical like getting water from your faucet and drinking it out of a filtered water bottle? Sometimes I think that the priorities and needs of people today are so out of whack that we all deserve to be obliterated. I can’t believe that you believe that shipping water across the globe from Amazon is a virtue. Good grief!”
Indeed, I think I messed up Josiah’s breakfast.
I wrote Josiah back and said thanks for writing, but I doubted he lived in a farmhouse with a 200-year-old point or that he had personal or medical reasons for the water he drank, but then, did I want to explain my water choices to him at all?
No, I don’t. That’s how I do it. I look in the mirror and have to like what I see. Josiah can stick his head in my well, and drink whatever he wants. He never answered me, of course.
But think about it.
You can’t even buy aluminum cans of water in our world without having to listen to everyone’s solutions for your life and objections to your answers. And how, precisely, are most people supposed to struggle and experiment and find their way, their purpose in life?
Thoreau would say shut down the devices and toss them into the nearest river. This won’t happen, they are here to stay, until and unless Mother Earth decides to get rid of them to punish us for our fickleness.
I think life is a test of our spiritual depth, every day, is that Josiah and so many others are angels sent to challenge us to figure out why we are here, by denying our room to think, thus forcing us to own what we believe. That has made me stronger.
There is the arrogance of thought everywhere – it loves the left and the right, and it loves cable television and social media. Both manipulate us and distract us, do our thinking for us so we can ignore both the questions and the answers we need to be asking: how do we want to live?
So we all get stuck right where we are, with no escape, no place to go.
They like to call it polarization as if it were a Lab effect or research problem or solstice side effect. Or maybe it’s just another political issue for politicians to sort out while they fail us, and we shake our heads and cluck at the system.
But the system isn’t broken, I am, we are.
When I think about it, I see it as a human problem, the moral laziness that pretends to dignity itself by the name of anger or despair or distracts us with arguments of politics or science or philosophy – none of which seem to have much to do with the problems of life.
Even if we have a shared destiny, as the prophets suggest, I know I have to work out my salvation. You cannot tell me who I am (although many people on social media who try), and I cannot show you who you are. I cannot hide behind God, even if there is a God.
If I don’t know my own identity, then who else will be able to see me, love me, or remember me? This can only be discovered in me, and from within.
Hate and fear are believed by the scholars and the deep thinkers of the mind to be first cousins; one makes the other possible and enables the other. We hate what we fear; we fear the unknown. The wheel turns and turns.
In recent years, I’ve come to believe that anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity, the fruit of unasked, and unanswered questions.
If I put labels on myself, or accept labels from others, then I have no need for questions and no need for answers. So what is a democracy for?
I have committed spiritual and intellectual suicide, the first death of the mind.
Our government is not a democracy. It’s a republic. “l pledge allegiance to the flag ..and to the republic for which it stands…”
Everyone I do mean everyone calls our system of government a democracy. A democracy is the rule of the majority. A republic is a form of government ruled by representatives of the citizen body. Those bastards in Washington DC don’t represent me. Who do they represent? Is it any wonder people are polarized and angry?
To be fair, although Josiah might not have phrased his comment tactfully, he is right in what he says: you’re kidding yourself if you think that buying water at $2 a bottle from Amazon is helping the environment–just the shipping materials and fuel alone more than cancel out the higher recyclability of aluminum versus plastic. You buy water because you’re the sort of person who likes to buy stuff. if you truly wanted to help the environment, you’d install a filter in your kitchen faucet and drink from it (and I don’t buy whatever you’re saying about your well–I know a great deal about water, and i’m not going to get into it here). What good does it do you to own three water bottles if you don’t use them to hold water? I’m sure you’ll write a haughty response, but if you’re going to write a blog post about using evidence of an Amazon water purchase as an example of how you’re being greener, be prepared to defend yourself to those of us who actually understand environmental consequences.
Nancy, to be honest, this isn’t a conversation I wish to have with you. I’m sure you mean well – people who tell other people what to do always mean well, yes? – but you simply don’t know enough about me, my well, my health, my life or needs to lecture me on how to help the environment with water. I respect your intent but messages like this, as I wrote, are the challenge of free-thinking and individual choices. I have many friends and many sources who care deeply about the environment, and I have plenty of good and sound advice about it – an environmentalist journalist told me about the aluminum bottles in the first place. Lectures from strangers online who don’t know me and are too lazy to ask questions are not what I consider good advice. How, for example, do you know how and if and when I use my metal water bottles, or where I travel, or what my particular health issues might be given time? Rather than asking, you simply make presumptions, which is both annoying and unhelpful to me and to other people struggling to figure out how to help the environment. I don’t owe you detailed explanations for my choices, and I’m not providing any here. Let’s say that I’m wrong, which I frequently am. Isn’t that something Maria and I can figure out for ourselves? I am happy I don’t ever post messages like yours, your tone is a wonderful example of how not to talk to people. You aren’t informing me, you’re just annoying me. You ought to learn the difference.
To be fair, I defend myself against pompous busybodies and know-it-alls every day, I consider it an honor to do that, individuality is as important to me as water. You are not any more tactful than Josiah, an no more fair or curious than he is, but just as self-righteous.
Your solutions for me are simple-minded and useless for us, if that matters. I suspect it doesn’t.
You have a lot of nerve suggesting I’ll be haughty, but then, it isn’t surprising: Merriam Webster defines it this way: “Blatantly and disdainfully proud; having or showing an attitude of superiority and contempt for people or things perceived to be inferior.” It feels good to be on the wrong side of that.
Part Two. Nancy, to be honest as well as fair, here’s the problem I have with messages like yours. You aren’t talking to me, you are talking at me, presuming I am too stupid to understand what I am doing or know its ramifications. Where I life, most people think environmental issues are the province of elitist, snotty people who they are dumb and care little about the realities of their lives. I was often considered stupid when I was not, and you are evoking that experience for me, and yes, that absolutely gets my fur up.
I do not believe I am one of those people who think climate change is an elitist conspiracy, but you have helped me to see how they feel, just the opposite of what you want to be doing, I believe, or think you are doing. Or perhaps should be doing. I don’t need a lecture from you, or from anybody, but a real conversation about the environment would actually be useful. Your tone is both obnoxious, and superior, and then ill-informed. I would love good advice about doing better for the environment, and I think that is praiseworthy, not stupid. I might make a lot of dumb moves along the way – I happen to like this one – but am quite sincere about getting there. That is not something one should be attacked or ridiculed for, especially if you presume to care about the earth. If we really care about the planet, we need to learn how to talk to people who don’t get it or understand it. You have some work to do. Insulting people and turning them off isn’t the best path. I’m sure you know more about environmental issues than I do, most people do. Helping people is better than preaching to them. There, that feels better, and is a real issue rather than a bs one.
Jon: My tone was fine; yours is not. Frankly, I don’t need to know any details of your life–the issue isn’t whether you need purchased water, or whether you like purchased water. The issue is whether or not buying water in aluminum bottles from Amazon results in a positive good for the environment. it doesn’t, and no amount of your sputtering and protesting will make it so. As an aside, you’re the sort of person that marketers love: you seem to fall prey to every hot new product that’s out there, from Quip toothbrushes to new iPhones to Apple credit cards. You can’t wait to rush to order things that you read about and then tell everyone on your blog how life-changing those products are. it would be much better for the environment if you tried buying locally and eschewed ordering over the Internet. Good luck in your environmental journey!
Sorry Nancy, I mistakenly thought you wanted to have a conversation rather than give a patronizing speech, I didn’t have high hopes. In addition to being lectured, my other favorite thing is for strangers to tell me what I am like and what I want and where I shop or should shop. Obviously, this is a waste of time. You get nastier with each message, but that is not the same as being smart. Best to you.
While I do not read you frequently, I follow your blog enough to know that your example is the kind that is so important in our world. Reflecting on personal choices and searches for connections is crucial in developing a sense of social responsibility and so important in this era of exaggerated polarization. It saddens me that some people read your blog only to nitpick. But then isn’t feeling superior, in some way or other, one of the significant distractions that are promoted by our corporate-dominated culture? That way we are enmeshed in seeing the flaws in others rather than seeking community to address the many ways that our society falls short in supporting and caring for each other.
Thanks George, I appreciate that message, it is thoughtful and encouraging..
Excellent
Many things to think about in your post. I used to obsess about “finding my purpose”. One day, I awoke in the midst of ruin and something inside said: “This is bullshit. Time to clean house, literally and figuratively. Go out in the world and see what you can do. Wake Up!”. I don’t think anymore about the purpose of my life – I just do what I can to move things in a good direction. I think most people care about the environment and want our country to be a good place to live: if others ask my opinion / advice (without wanting a fight), I’ll engage, otherwise not. My neighbor buys gallons of plastic-bottled water: I wish she wouldn’t , but fighting with her won’t change her ways. I persuaded her to keep vegetable peels and mix them with fallen leaves (that used to go in the dumpster) in the communal garden I made from wasteland a few years ago. She now likes going to the garden, kicking apart dead leaves, looking for peels: all gone! – just earthworms and new soil. One thing at a time.