Let’s start at the end.
What will be your final thoughts as you see death barreling toward you? Will you see your life flash before you? Will you cry out at the apprehension of your mortality? Will you feel a torrent of regret?
As it happens, I know my own answer to that question. Years ago, at the tender age of 19, I experienced my first brush with death. It was late at night. I had gone home during a brief break from my job at the movie theater in the small east Texas town where I went to college. I had to be back at work for the midnight movie, but I was out to get a bite to eat. I was at a red light. When the light changed, I pulled forward- this was before I’d learned never to trust the other drivers on the road- and looked to my left, where I saw a car moving at high speed toward me. I knew in an instant that they weren’t going to be able to stop- they weren’t even going to try to stop- and that they were going to broadside me. I foresaw my imminent demise, and in that half-second, I had what might’ve been my final thought. In the full profundity of my nineteen-year-old self, I thought,
“Oh well.”
There was no remorse, no clutching of hair, no cries of “Why me?” Just a calm resignation.
I couldn’t in confidence say that this reaction was a portent of wisdom.
To be sure, wisdom, or at least the sort of wisdom that you can seek out at the age of nineteen, was of interest to me. I’d been reading voraciously for years by now, had swallowed whole the Harvard Classics, had read Alan Watts and Nietzsche simultaneously, had devoured Vonnegut and Mark Twain, had explored The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, was at least somewhat versed in quantum physics, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was my favorite book (still might be.) Mind you, I probably didn’t understand about 90 percent of it (and probably still don’t,) but I’d read, and was interested in all of it. I cannot, however, claim to have had much of a foothold in wisdom per se. I was more a seeker than a possessor of wisdom, and I guess that’s still true today.
I walked away from that accident. My poor, beloved Subaru didn’t make it, but I did. I even made it back to work in time for the midnight show. I gave my mortality a long, hard look that night. I had a drink or two (the legal drinking age was 18 back then,) lamented the loss of my car, and that night, as I lay sleepless, I looked closely at the shimmering veil that floats between our consciousness and the long dark in the near distance. I resolved to find or make meaning in my life.
And then life intervened, as it does. Within months, I’d fallen in love, gotten married, moved, and had a child on the way. I can’t say that my experiences after that were typical, but they were full of all of the common milestones of our lives- children, college, friends, jobs, divorce, juggling, rock and roll- you know, the regular stuff. Okay, maybe my experiences were not exactly “normal;” in fact, when I was thinking about writing this, I told my wife “I can’t write about my own life, because my life just isn’t relatable,” but upon further reflection, I realize that none of our lives are exactly “typical,” except insofar as they each share certain commonalities. Each of us is made from the peculiarities of our lives. Every experience is unique to the individual, and the series of events that comprise our lives is particularly singular. There is no normal, and to make broad statements about what that might be is to devalue the individual experience. Suffice it to say that my life, like everyone’s, has been its own.
I can’t say exactly that I found my meaning over those years, though. Like most of us, I was too busy living to give much time to questions of why. It’s hard to think about your innermost values when you’re busy making dinner. And there have been a lot of dinners.
Standing higher on the hill now, looking out on the incomprehensible vista of life behind me, some of it becomes clearer to me, as I found it in the everyday experiences of life; I find special significance in my wife and children, and in the relationships that I’ve had with my friends and family, which were really good for a person who came of age lonely and mentally isolated from the world. I see that there was some striving for happiness, at least of the sort that can be obtained experientially. I had a lot of fun, for sure. And I kept reading and thinking about ideas. But there’s also a lot of anxiety and depression back there. And idleness. Those things probably travel hand-in-hand, and are, maybe, antithetical to the quest for meaning. They’re probably also not uncommon- most of us are burdened from time to time with some sort of psychological troublemaker. At any rate, all that time and distance has left me barely any the wiser.
I’ve lived too much of my life still in that “Oh well” moment, still resigned to a world that was happening whether I liked it or not. But somehow, I knew better. I knew (and know) that I had what the philosophers and psychologists call “agency,” which is the ability to take action in my own life. What’s more, I have the responsibility to do so. I have always known that I was responsible for my own actions, in a sort of backward-looking way, wherein I am forced to own up to all the things I’ve done (or failed to do) after the fact. But I am also compelled to make my own decisions about how to move forward. Moreover, this knowledge necessitates that I move beyond reacting to the events in my life to actually creating the world that I want to live in.
So, what would that world look like? It sure as heck wouldn’t look like the one we’re living in right now, at least not the one depicted on the news each night. Mind you, I largely don’t live in that world. Neither do any of us, really, except to the level that we allow ourselves to become pulled under by it. Unless we are one of those people shaking our fist in front of the courthouse (and maybe we should be,) or out there spreading ridiculous conspiracies (aliens are running the government, btw,) our lives are apt to be a little more mundane. So where do we look for inspiration?
There are plenty of schemes out there, and plenty of people who want to tell us how to live our lives, from white-robed gurus to proponents for the return of an (inaccurately) imagined past wherein Father Knows Best, a woman’s place is in the home, and never-you-mind about the many oppressed minorities. How ever to choose?
Fortunately, we all have the resources to help figure it out. Unfortunately, to do so requires something that we don’t normally do; We have to look inside ourselves. And what will we find prowling about in there? Among the remnants of yesterday’s cheeseburger and your current obsession with Stranger Things, there are undoubtedly a few values that underlie the rest of your life. So how do we suss them out?
We ponder. Finally, we’ve hit something that I’m good at! Sit still for a minute and ask yourself- What Matters? What are the most important things to me? What are the values that I hold most sacred? It’s not as difficult as you might imagine. Don’t let anyone else tell you what they are or what they ought to be either. Our values might align with others’, indeed they inevitably will, but don’t let them sway you. Unless they come from inside you, they are not authentic to you. And don’t worry- in the end, hardly anyone really wants to destroy the whole world.
The point of this exercise is to become aware of the things that you find important in order that you might begin to shape your world to align with those values. And don’t worry about “the world.“ It’s just too big. You only need to think about your world. Ask yourself, am I living in accordance with the principles that I hold most dear? What can I do to express my innermost truth to the world? Should I be doing more than wearing my Save the Whales t-shirt?
I’ve been trying to take my own advice, delving into the vast empty space that is my brain, trying to roust out some of those elusive values, and I’ve done a little good. In addition to the things that I mentioned earlier- my love of family, friends, fun, and education- I’ve become more aware of my love of the natural world, my love of creativity, and more broadly, my love of love itself, of compassion and spiritual reckoning with life.
Which brings me back to the here and now. Death is not currently speeding toward me at 90 miles an hour, so perhaps I can breathe for the moment. Of course, few of us are expecting death to come sweeping into the room, but we know that it’s lurking out there somewhere. For this instant though, I’ll just pretend that I don’t know that. Or maybe I should instead remain very aware of its looming presence. Either way, it’s up to me to take action.
So what will it be?
After years of fits and starts and mostly stops, I have resolved in recent years to pursue my creative self in earnest. As it turns out, that is easier said than done. Unlike the image of the artist driven by passion to create, I am more easily driven to the comfy chair, where I am perfectly content to stare off into space for hours on end. This is not to say that I am not creative; in fact, while in these reveries, I am endlessly creative, at one instant writing languorous streams of prose, at another designing homes that I’ll never live in, and at another composing amusing little ditties in my mind. But, by and large, these faint whispers fade into the air like the sound of car wheels rolling into the distance and come to nothing. I get sad sometimes at the end of one of these reveries, as I have become accustomed to the idea that they are inevitably stillborn; whatever good there is in these ideas, they are doomed to the trash heap of time, as an idea unacted upon is a lifeless one. But of course, I know better. I know both that an idea has a life unto itself, that it exists on some morphogenic plane that may come to some sort of fruition in another field, and also that the only thing standing between me and the full flowering in my own garden of that idea is me putting in the effort of tending it. And I guess that’s what I’m getting at here; in order to become the person that I would like to grow into, I have to cultivate the qualities that I would like to embody, and that entails acting in the world.
So where do I look for motivation? For now, at least, I think it rests at least partially in that sense of responsibility that I was talking about a few paragraphs ago. First, I am responsible for determining my own course of action. Secondly, I feel that it is my responsibility to realize my abilities, such as they are. Given my underfed propensities for writing and image-making, I suppose that it is incumbent upon me to put them into practice… Thirdly, I have the responsibility to live my life according to the values that I hold dear. I’ll even go beyond that and say that I would like to promote those values that seem worthy of commitment.
So here I am, trying to figure out “What Matters.” Mind you, I have no delusion that I know any better than anyone else. That’s why I’ve gone on this journey- to learn from you. And you. And all the many people that I interview for this project. I’ll hold to the notion that I can’t let any one person (or institution) dictate to me what I should think, but I hope that by talking to a broad spectrum of unique individuals, I might glean some picture of what that might be for us as a people.
If I should do these things, perhaps the next time that I look up to see death careening toward me, my thoughts will run toward something more than a resigned “Oh well,” or at least it will be something along the lines of “Oh well, I did my best…”
What about you?