What if the meaning of life is the chase for meaning?
Three lines you won't stop thinking about - plus, our next Candlelight Chat!
Our next Candlelight Chat (for paid and scholarship subscribers) will be on Sunday, August 17, from 1-2 PM ET, on Zoom. Please mark your calendars - details to come. This one will be “Just Us”! And, as always, you can participate actively if you wish to, but you can also just watch and listen. I really hope to see you there! (And if you’d like to subscribe for a Quiet Life membership, you can do that here.)
It’s time to share the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz again, if only because it’s been a few months since I did.
Today: just three glorious lines, from his poem Winter, that will tell you everything you need to know about how to live fully in the face of mortality (h/t Free Press):
Waters close over us, a name lasts but an instant.
Not important whether the generations hold us in memory.
Great was that chase with the hounds for the unattainable meaning of
the world.
PS Milosz was one of us. “I’m a very private person, and I don’t want to be famous,” he told the press when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980. “I want to return to my quiet ways.”
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More to come this week…and in the meantime, I always love to hear your thoughts - all comments are welcome, but here are some prompts to get you started:
Do you agree that it’s not important whether “the generations hold us in memory”? (Here I distinguish between children/grandchildren, if we have them - i.e., the generations we’ve personally met - and the unknown ones who will follow them.)
Do you feel liberated by the idea that the meaning of life is unattainable, yet the chase for it is the truly great thing?
Is there anything in particular you’d like us to discuss at our upcoming “Just Us” Candlelight Chat?
I spent a year or more writing a memoir about my childhood. Part of the reason for this effort was to get to "know" ancestors I never met and to make sense of what happened long ago. To some degree, I was looking for the meaning of life. In the end what I realized is that the only meaning is in the people we touch, a sweet memory we leave behind, a new perspective we inspire in ourselves or others. The only chase I think comes from the ego and not the soul. I spent some of my life wrapped in that and so happy to be free of it. Meaning is in all our moments that unfold naturally without stressful forethought or planning. The tides continue to roll in and out. Stardust continue to fall to earth to enrich us.
I recently wrote a piece about not needing to be important, but wanting to be significant....for a moment when I connect with someone, in someone's heart that I may have been allowed to enter, in someone's fleeting memory of me. To touch others deeply, even for a moment, while I am here on this earth....Will it be forgotten? Yes. Will I be forgotten? Yes. And yet, that seems worthy enough of a goal for the time spent here.
As far as possible ideas to talk about....
I have been even more sensitive lately, given the political situation in our country. I find myself getting irritable over what feel like extroverted values being imposed, albeit not consciously or at all maliciously, on us. Like, and I am working on a piece about this as well...somewhat tongue in cheek, but also serious....about the value placed on weather. Why is sunny referred to as the better weather? Why are storms or grey skies something often referred to as bad weather, with the hope of "good" weather to come? (I even talk back to the weather forecasters at this point..one of the joys of aging...holding nothing back...)
I happen to love gray skies and storms (not the ones that hurt or endanger people) and feel soothed by the grey weather. It gives my introverted self permission to breathe and be...and not have to be Sunny and Bright. Even my home is on the darker side, being more like a cabin in the woods and not the bright light contempory designs so often seen in newer real estate, which can actually make me feel anxious...no place to go in a corner and be quiet.....
And when traveling with friends, why is staying in the same room the norm? I will forever more choose to have my own hotel room at the end of each day. I will be able to come home to myself, to breathe, and to be an even better traveling companion.
And why do we say that feeling sad or angry is bad? They are how we feel, and all feelings are ok. Yes, some feelings are more comfortable than others, certainly. But the darker feelings that are not sunny and bright are often seen as something to get through until we feel "better". Says who?
Maybe what I have mentioned can all fit into the subtle (sometimes not so subtle) values placed on everything extrovert, in ways that we don't even often recognize...
Looking forward to our next Candlelight Chat! To be among my sacred tribe.....