“The struggle for growth is not for us alone; it is not self-indulgent. It is our duty, and service, to those around us as well, for through such departures from the comfortable we bring a larger gift to them.” — James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
To be a human being is a miraculous gift. The odds that something so unique as humanity exists in the universe, that you get to be a member of that tribe, and that you get to be the particular human that you happen to be, are so astronomical it boggles the mind.
Yet here you are — a walking, breathing, sentient miracle, with your priceless mix of attributes and qualities and ways of thinking and seeing and feeling the universe that have never happened before and will never happen again. What a wonder you are! To live, and know that you are alive, and know what an extraordinary convergence of possibilities your life is, is a truth so bright with wonder it’s difficult to look at straight on.
To live, and know that you are alive, and know what an extraordinary convergence of possibilities your life is, is a truth so bright with wonder it’s difficult to look at straight on.
But it’s important you do look, because those who don’t may never realize what they are, and never ask themselves the one vital question that any priceless intelligent being must ask, posed as it was so simply by the late poet Mary Oliver:
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”1
Society, Culture, Religion — each of these push on you their own preferred answer to that question, but none of them are worth a damn.
Society tells you you must be a productive member of the collective, which while once helpful as a guideline, has long since devolved into selling your soul to serve the great machine of corporate greed.
Culture tells you you must rise in the ranks of social power, popularity and privilege, but this turns out to be nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated version of the hateful cliquish games played by children in middle school.
Religion tells you you must perform a host of sanctified tasks (and avoid a long list of profane ones) in order to prove your worthiness to be here, but this turns out to be just a specialized version of the same cliquish, childish game that Culture plays.
The soulless pursuit of status, success, power or popularity within the social structure is nothing more than a cheap, hollowed-out substitute for genuine meaning. It’s all an elaborate distraction, a game of posers and pretenders all trying to out-convince one another that they are the real deal. As the Apostle Paul noted, so insightfully,
“When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they lack wisdom and act like fools” (2 Corinthians 10:12).
“Winning” at some social game — be it riches or popularity or privilege or power — has nothing to do with maturity, nothing to do with healing, nothing to do with wholeness, and nothing at all to do with meaning.
It’s not what humans are for.
We humans — each of us a uniquely wild, mysterious conflagration of longing, intelligence, and awe-full vulnerability — are made for love. We are made for love in the same way dandelions are made for wind, and, just as children do with those fragile seeds, God makes a wish every time he blows one of us out into the world.
And … c’mon now … even though we do our best to pretend otherwise; in our honest moments, we all know what that wish is, don’t we?
God wishes we would become love.
God wishes we would become love.
To plant our souls deep in the earth, to love the world from there, and then to die, as all seeds must die, for the sake of that love, and, in this way, to become that love,
to become a part of what that love creates,
to join God in it,
to find Home at last.
That’s what humans are for.
from her poem, “The Summer Day”