When I was in college I had a short friendship with a woman who'd recently had a daughter. My friend was a very slight person with fairly small hips, but the birthing process had taken her around two hours and one really large squeeze, which broke most of her capillaries.
As she described it, the trick to avoiding a multi-hour ordeal was fairly simple: At the point when things seemed unbearable, she simply told herself "the only way out is through." And then she just squeezed, refusing to let up until it was over.
I am ten years older than my youngest sister. We have an annual tradition of visiting a cabin built by our grandfather in upstate NY. When my sister was a toddler, and I a teenager, she fell down my grandfather's stairs. They are steep, shallow, wooden. There is no carpet. As she sat at the bottom of the steps, her face moving from surprise to stormy, I came to her.
"Anything broken?" I asked, patting her arms, legs, ribs. She shook her head, having not yet decided whether to scream.
"It hurts." I said, "You can cry if you want, but you're okay."
She didn't cry.
I was a bike messenger for a little while in 2006. At one point I had an accident. I don't know how, except that I woke up in the middle of an intersection, looking at the front end of a car that clearly wanted to get by.
A voice was asking "are you okay?"
"No," I said, unable to get a sense of which way was up, "get me out of the street."
"Are you okay?"
"No..."
I started getting clearer, managed to drag myself out of the road along with my bike.
"Are you okay?"
"No. What happened?"
I sat on the curb, rested my head in my hands and tried to feel if anything had gone wrong internally.
"Are you..?"
I stood up, glared at the source of the question. "Clearly not," I said, my mouth and eyes full of disgust. I left on foot.
I've been stationary all day, feeling strangely weak and confused by how easily the rain makes me want to do nothing. Wet. Cold. Normally I am unfazed, but today, no thank you.
Listening to a long, somewhat rambling pod-cast on the subject of personal development. The speaker says from the beginning that it is unplanned. He starts the hour thinking about the nature of death and impermanence, and concludes by suggesting we are all essentially spiritual beings who have come to strengthen ourselves in our alignment with truth, love, and power.
One of those rare moments when it seems like I've heard something worthwhile.
But damn. That looks like a really long road.
I stumbled across an article about Buckminster Fuller none too long ago. Apparently he claimed that purpose is innate, but follows a rule of "precession." The explanation being that one's purpose is achieved as a side-effect of one's goals.
Bees, for example, have individual goals along the lines of "go find pollen to make honey." As a side effect of their doing so, they pollinate plants, granting the rest of us the ability to eat.
Unfortunately, this means that there is no achieving anything in any lasting sense. Best to find a way to live while loving what you do, because there is no finish line. (Unless, as George Carlin jokes, we actually are here to produce plastic*.)
Perhaps, for those of us constantly hungry for meaning, the best we can hope for is positive feedback about the effects our lives have.
* Of course, if Carlin's approach is right, we're probably here to develop some kind of heavily armed super-consciousness.
Lilly is an artist, among three hosts on a panel discussion on art, architecture, and the public sphere held Saturday.
She went to a village in Rwanda as an artist. The people there showed her mass graves, bones stacked haphazardly on open shelves. She observed that healing would not happen there, with the bones of their loved ones simply haunting them on a daily basis. She showed the living a few tile mosaic techniques and found herself aiding the design and construction of a proper burial site. The new one is white and purple. Purple is the color of national mourning. It is beautiful, and Lilly claims this is the most important point: Beauty is healing for the soul.
Lilly is not a student of community organizing, activism, or politics. She did not lead the effort either. She was a catalyst. "Without me, the work would not have happened, but with me, it was not mine."
She is older, English is not her native tongue. She comes across as extremely intuitive, her actions and words seem to come straight from her creative right-brain.
She spoke of innate knowledge. Where others at the meeting were applying theories and studies, she simply followed her instincts.
I do not think she struggles with meaning. It might be unwise to adopt another's path, or cause, or launch into some misguided attempt to save the world, but there is something here. I think it is about right brains, and moving from right to left brain and back. Getting closer to animal instincts without losing one's reason.
Does the idea of innate knowledge ring any bells?
On the phone you ask "what kind of meaning do you want? What would satisfy you?"
"I don't know," I say. "I feel like I'm stuck in a movie and I just want there to be enough there that engaging my suspension of disbelief will actually lead to some kind of reward."
"You're so dark," you say, laughing.
After we stop talking I lay in bed, look at the ceiling. Tomorrow I suppose I'll get up early, make another attempt to do something relevant for someone, somewhere. Tonight I feel like I'm at the edge of the ocean at night. I wish I could dive into it, learn about the all the strange creatures living beneath the surface. Or maybe swim accross, discover a new continent. But I just have this tiny body, and I can't see very well now that the sun has set. So all I can do is look at the waves and wonder.
I am not sad, but I don't understand.
"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; seek what they sought." ~Matsuo Basho
Ayn Rand (of all people), points out that in a strange place, one must ask: "Where am I? How can I discover it? What should I do?"