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Blog post on Meaning and Purpose – 24th October 2023
By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Conselling
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The search for meaning and purpose
Inspired by Maria Popova at The Marginalian, and one of my current clients
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By Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling
24th October 2023
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I did not intend to write this document.
It erupted inside me.
Why?
Because I heard from somebody who said she wants to live “a meaningful and fulfilling life”.
I think she is seeking wisdom!
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Wisdom is like a torch in the dark night of the soul
It is easy to assert that “life is empty and meaningless”
Until you run into a soul that has carved meaning out of suffering
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If we do not know how to live well, then we perforce must live badly!
One of the hardest things to feel is that “I love you”
Even harder is to admit “I love all of them! And all of life!”
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My quest for meaning and purpose began
Outside a shabby bookshop in Dublin
In 1960.
It continues to this day, despite my 77 years of experience…of searching…
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Over the years, from 14 to 77 years, I have evolved from an autistic loner to a human being capable of profound feelings for, and engagement with, others.
At the age of 43, in a personal development seminar, somebody told me: “You have so much to give!”
I was bemused.
Up to that stage, I thought the point of life was “to take”! Or to receive!
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A few years earlier, I listened to an audio program by Werner Erhard
He was talking about the bad stuff that happens to all of us in life
His point was that “our karma is what happens to us”
And his question was “Just how much of the world can you handle?”
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Wisdom, if it is real wisdom, teaches us how to handle our karma.
Life is suffering, some but not all of the time.
You cannot pull night and day apart.
And you cannot pull joy and suffering apart.
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I have been influenced by many “teachers”, most of whom I met in books…
Wonderful books, too numerous to mention…
And sometimes online…
The main online teacher who has moved me, and made me more human, is Maria Popova.
(She – or her words – crept up on my heart and mind, and softened them! And this happened from minimal exposure to her wisdom! I have probably not read more than 6 or 8 of her blog posts over the past 15 years!)
Our lives can be transformed in the blink of an eye, with the right word, the right glance, the right human communication.
Today (24th October 2023) is the seventeenth birthday of her blog, which is now called “The Marginalian” .
For each of the seventeen years that she has been publishing her blog post, she has now presented, in one blog post, seventeen pieces of wisdom which she learned, one in each of those successive seventeen years.
Here they are. I hope they move you, help you, support you, grow you, make you wiser and more resilient in the face of the great difficulties of living our wonderful lives! 🙂 The great paradox of dancing joyfully through a virtual war zone!
Jim Byrne, Doctor of Counselling, 24th October 2023
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From Maria Popova, a admirable seeker after wisdom:
Here, layered in chronological order, are the seventeen learnings upon this seventeenth birthday:
- Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.” We live in a culture where one of the greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our “opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others, without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
- Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
- Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
- Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken. Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which all else springs?
- As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.
- Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
- “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
- Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, in discussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while you are healthy to protect your radiance.
- Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want. But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
- Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly beast lies dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself, tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today, especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.
- A reflection originally offered by way of a wonderful poem about pi: Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality. Our maps are still maps, approximating the landscape of truth from the territories of the knowable — incomplete representational models that always leave more to map, more to fathom, because the selfsame forces that made the universe also made the figuring instrument with which we try to comprehend it.
- Because Year 12 is the year in which I finished writing Figuring (though it emanates from my entire life), and because the sentiment, which appears in the prelude, is the guiding credo to which the rest of the book is a 576-page footnote, I will leave it as it stands: There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
- In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and most disquieting places, to the unfathomed trenches of the soul where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding. Forgiveness is the engine of buoyancy that keeps the submarine rising again and again toward the light, so that it may become a lifeboat once more.
- Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads of which we weave the lifeline that saves us.
Delight in the age-salted man on the street corner waiting for the light to change, his age-salted dog beside him, each inclined toward the other with the angular subtlety of absolute devotion.
Delight in the little girl zooming past you on her little bicycle, this fierce emissary of the future, rainbow tassels waving from her handlebars and a hundred beaded braids spilling from her golden helmet.
Delight in the snail taking an afternoon to traverse the abyssal crack in the sidewalk for the sake of pasturing on a single blade of grass.
Delight in the tiny new leaf, so shy and so shamelessly lush, unfurling from the crooked stem of the parched geranium.
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Yes, except we furnish both the grains and the scales. I alone can weigh the blue of my sky, you of yours.
- Outgrow yourself.
- Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
- Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments, what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Buried between parentheses in the middle of Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this elemental truth, which turned his greatest heartbreak into his greatest masterpiece:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse
unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one
way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)
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Copyright (c) Maria Popova, 2023
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Postscript: Please consider Maria Popova’s 17 wise statements to become at least a point of departure for your own journey of enquiry.
Go well! Stay well!
Jim
(My words are copyright (c) Jim Byrne, 2023)
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Last year, I published a book of short stories about love, sex, passion, and loss. I am now planning to add two or three new stories to that book, and to republish it.
Susan was convinced that everybody should be able to have a happy relationship, even though she had been distinctly unsuccessful in this endeavour, so far.
He is out there now, on the forecourt in front of their bungalow, outside the garage, clicking around in those silly cycling shoes, in his tight Lycra pants, and with a big S for Superman on the back of his cycling jacket. Superman! What a baby!
He could be very solicitous, always wanting to please her, with breakfast in bed, or flowers, or a little gift. And very passionate.
He mounted the bike outside the garage where his Tesla, Model S, all-electric beauty was safely stored, and adjusted his cycling helmet. Nobody else in Suffolk owned the latest Tesla! He’d never even seen one on the streets of London.
When they’d met and got together, she seemed easy to persuade or manipulate into doing the kinds of things that excited him; taking risks; facing challenges. But she was also safe. He did not need to cling to her very much in order to be reassured that she was connected to him. He did not have to fear either that she would run off on him, or that she would make it impossible for him to have any excitement or risk or danger in his life.
In March she joined an archery club, and had ten lessons with a big German instructor, who seemed to be keen on her, but she resisted his advances. Nevertheless, she went to the archery range three days each week, and practiced until she could hit a bullseye every single time she unleashed an arrow. She was using a Zen approach of non-conscious functioning, which she was learning from a new Japanese coach. Pretty quickly, she could do it on automatic – pull the bow, aim and release the arrow, without any conscious thought – and she was extremely good at it.
She would run down the stairs, but she would have to be careful not to trip, so that would slow her down. Leila might be in the way as she reached the front door, so Susan would have to get her out of harm’s way before she could take any other action.
Hack writers are beloved of the publishing industry. Principled writers are unpopular with vested interests. They are a nuisance to the forces of political expediency. They undermine the evil side of human nature.
Whatever wounds you have, hidden in your childhood history, I do hope you will try to dress them; process them; and heal them. And one way to do that is to practice principled writing about them, whether as private autobiographical writing, or published fictionalized autobiography.
Our mothers have the most dramatic effect upon our psychical and mental health, and upon our life chanced. So choose your mother carefully!
Best wishes,
My work involves a lot of time spent with unhappy couples, helping them to find a way out of their emotional misery. This is territory which I have know since early childhood, having grown up with unhappily married parents. My own first marriage was a mess.
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