We all want to enter the action of life, we want to do things, we want to connect with others, we want to belong, we want to be in community. That is our birthright, it's hardwired. We're bred and designed for action. That's what our senses, nerves, muscles, metabolism, limbs of locomotion are made for.
Without action we can't become ourselves. Change comes to us in and from action. But we live in a mass culture that trivializes the meaningfulness of our own actions. How can we find our way back to them?
The direct route is to re-encounter and understand deeply, and perhaps for the first time, what it is that changes us most, what hits us hard and deeply, what irrevocably alters our path. These actions would have to be meaningful.
Clearly there are certain major life turnings that do change us, and so meet that first criterion for meaning -- events that are so basic, natural and universally present as to suggest an evolutionary origin, and I would count this a second criterion for meaning. When these turnings have also been the subjects of legend and myth from the earliest times, they meet the third criterion and constitute what I consider the signal events of a lifetime. Among them we would have to include separation from the mother, leaving home, first love, marriage, childbirth, illness, healing, creative accomplishment, discovery, creation of a home, uprootedness, divorce, finding one's calling, change of profession, loss of friends, death of the first parent, death of the second parent, death of a spouse, confrontation with evil, retirement, preparation for your own death and finally death.
We must all confront them and we confront them in action. They're not simply matters to ponder. They happen to us as we happen to them. They're transactional. We engage with these actions one way or the other. They find us or we find them. Death is the universal that always finds us.
All the virtues and values we customarily associate with meaning in life emerge first and most fundamentally in the signal events -- fortitude, heroism, duty, sacrifice, suffering, joy -- all the things that make life seem important to us, everything that is the grist for all stories, myths, songs, poems, dramas, artistic expressions, philosophies.
They are signal events because they signal the major change moments. They don't exhaust the meaning of life but they are indispensable to it. The story we tell ourselves about ourselves is composed out of what we go through in the signal events. We affirm the importance of these tomes by remembering them, sometimes with a visceral recollection, that speaks indubitably to their importance, and hence to the meaning or lack or loss of meaning of our lives. It depends on how we traverse them. And that itself is exceedingly curious: though we remember them forever after we are often oblivious to their import, and our opportunities, as they are happening.
Yet these meaningful events are developmentally scheduled. They run on epigenetic rules and are central to our nature as living beings, as in the necessary sequence: birth, social connectedness, sexual maturity (usually) and death (always). Surely we can learn to be in better touch with them. How?
I contend that love and wisdom enter and shape all the signal events. The signal events of our lives are shaped by love and wisdom because they play out in the rhythms of approach and separation (A-S) and withdrawal and return (W-R) which form the living dynamic of our social lives and our inwardness. Without wisdom and love and their interplay we cannot make real sense of our personal history or our inner lives. There are different ways to get there. One my father called the school of hard knocks. He meant a shriving of personality from rebuffs, an abrading of character in the wheel of action, but not only rebuffs and disappointment, but the strengthening of resolve in the face of those losses and a deeper involvement with the signal events.
When you graduated from the school of hard knocks, you were a Mensch. A Mensch was capable of action in love and wisdom despite pains, reverses and disillusionments. My father believed the school of hard knocks had a salutary way of getting our attention over time however defended we may be. It would knock us into our centers. First we'd be knocked out of our "family trance" by the reality of the culture, work, labor, relationship, competition, etc. Then if we fell into the "cultural trance" of successomania, hard knocks would wake us up here too. In the world of successomania we get hard knocks whenever our goodness is punished. In fact, the great burden of cultural experience is that it shows us how much is missing in our lives. Tolerance of the paradox that something is missing, while pushing on without knowing what it is, strengthens us to remain relatively equable under threat. To tolerate ambiguous situations, to accept the unknowable and uncontrollable, can bring with it a great awakening to the presence of a rhythm underlying change, a deeper systole and diastole in the workers of love and wisdom, in their legs and turning points. From this rhythm we get our first real evidence that "this too shall pass." We live with and are activated by change no longer as a metaphysical saw, or religious maxim or matter of faith, but as a fact, perceivable to the trained senses. When I look back on my life, so loved, I am even grateful for my heartbreaks. The sense is, if life was better, it would be less.
That's why sensuality, desire, passion and loss, ignorance, confusion, madness and discovery all have their place in the schooling of the human spirit toward love and wisdom. Can you possibly deny that these human experience are the very stuff of life? We should be wary about living too safely (too safely in the spiritual dimension) by running too straightly to the eternal. Perhaps we only approach the highest places through the rough course of a lifetime with all its shocks and suffering in the signal events. Passion may be salutary for us. The better we understand this the more we willingly we will accept ourselves as perpetual starting places. We will avoid false expectations and we will not make misplaced efforts. We will accept intensification and reversal, and accepting intensification and reversal we will come into clearer consciousness of our turning points in the moments that matter most: when they are occurring. There we will touch our freedom.
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Copyright 1999 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 08/23/99 (rge)