What Makes A Life?
"Who has a why to live can bear almost any how." Friedrich Nietzsche
(art by Kazuyuki Sutoh)
For many, my life might appear small and boring. It certainly doesn’t show success by our culture’s standards of power, prestige and money. There is nothing glamorous or social media spectacular about it. No endless photos of international travels to exotic locales.
It is quiet, reflective and contemplative.
This morning, I prepared my coffee and went outside into the rain soaked world and listened to the sounds of the Song Sparrow, the Brown Thrasher, the Northern Mockingbird and the Robin. I sipped my coffee and walked about the garden, noticing the daffodils were about to bloom and that my purple crocuses and my hellebores already had. I also saw that the bulbs I planted in the autumn were beginning to sprout, pushing through the earth.
I gazed up at the small remnants of sunlight peeking through the gray canopy of sky.
I noticed a Robin pecking at the soft, wet soil as he pulled a worm from it.
When I went back inside, I got some cold, juicy plums from the refrigerator and ate them. They were so juicy and sweet and put me in mind of William Carlos Williams’ poem “"This Is Just To Say.”
Sitting on the sofa, I read for awhile in the soft light of one lamp. Poetry. Philosophy. Maria Popova’s latest tome, Traversal. Perhaps it was this last one that had me asking myself": What is the deeper underlying current of my life? What gives it meaning?
Certainly there are no grand revelations nor electrifying epiphanies. It made me think of the lines from my favorite Virginia Woolf novel, To The Lighthouse. In it, Woolf writes, “What is the meaning of life? That was all- a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.”
I love her phrase “there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark…” How transcendent and true. Yet we so often want that bigger revelation, that grand sweeping understanding to the question “What is the meaning of life?” Yet the older I get, the more I realize that I am less interested in answers than I am in developing deeper questions. Certainly I’m led less by knowing and more by curiosity which leads to wonder, leads to awe, leads to humility over hubris in realizing how truly finite I am in an infinite universe. It gives me the perspective just as staring at the sea and realizing how deep and unexplored it, too, is.
The kids in my class often ask me, “How do you know all this?” whenever I introduce them to the wonderment of the world and the universe. “Curiosity,” I reply and hope that mine sparks theirs.
Instead of constantly searching for meaning, I allow the moment to offer up its own, no matter how minuscule. It might simply be noticing the beauty of raindrops of the leaves of a plant in my garden. Sometimes, it’s sitting in traffic, and noticing the way light comes through the clouds. Or it might be listening to Chopin’s Nocturnes.
One night, I walked a few blocks from my small gray house to a local Argentinian restaurant. As I did, I noticed the trees were filled with hundreds of Robins. The air was electric with their songs and the sounds of their wings. I just stood there and wasn’t present to that moment. Or, as I sat there, silently, in the restaurant, listening to others gathered, speaking in Spanish. The beauty of that language no less than the birdsong I had just heard in the trees. Both filled me with a sense of gratitude for being alive in that moment.
I did not need an answer. I only needed to be present.
