The Addiction of Distraction
When you choose someone or some way of life, you invest your heart. Choice becomes an invitation to commitment. When you commit, you deepen presence. Though your choice narrows the range of possibility now open to you, it increases the intensity of the chosen possibility. New dimensions of the chosen path reveal themselves; a new path opens inwards to depth and outwards to new horizons. Your choice has freed your longing from dispersing itself over a whole range of surface. When we avoid choice we often become victims of distraction. We flit like the butterfly from one flower to the next, delightfully seduced by its perfume and colour. We remain secretly addicted to the temporary satisfaction and pleasure of immediacy. Kierkegaard divided the life-journey into stages, and he saw that the aesthetic stage was the wanderer whose longing is magnetized on the endless array of novelties. We celebrate the surface unwilling to become acquainted with the depths where the darkness plies its slow and patient transfigurations. The colour and excitement of the surface, though delightful, are ultimately deceptive; they keep us from recognizing the habit of our repetitions and the boredom and poverty that sleep there. When we choose a definite path or partner, we leave the endless array of beckoning surface. We go below the façade of repetition and risk the danger of encounter, challenge, and responsibility. When you choose with discernment, integrity, and passion, you submit yourself to the slow and unglamorous miracle of change.
Irony and Recognition
When the hero in a tragedy acts out of great passion and longing, he is often blind to the choice he is awakening. He participates in a sequence of actions without ever dreaming where it is actually leading him. Often it may be clear to others, but not to him. When one acts greatly, one engenders great vulnerability. True recognition is withheld. The ground of realization prepares itself slowly. You are so close to what you are involved in that you literally cannot see it. This can often happen in relationships. The film Fatal Attraction portrayed a man who was guided totally by sexual passion and was blind to the nature of the person with whom he had become involved. It can also happen in a life over-committed to work. The workaholic is doing everything right to provide for the family, but is blind to the fact that he is already losing his family because of his obsession with work. They never see him; they and he are quietly becoming strangers to each other. When we spoil our children, we deprive them of learning the art of discipline and the recognition of boundaries. We think we are showing them love and support. Ironically, we are preparing great difficulties for them. Irony continues so long as you do not see. Then, when you suddenly do, you see through the whole sequence at once. You realize how the consequences have been building the whole time, unknown to you. Such recognition breaks your blindness; it also shows you clearly your own part in the story and your responsibility for what happened. It reveals that you have been obscurely complicit in your own downfall. Irony is the shy sister of such recognition.
It is vital that one’s spiritual quest be accompanied by a sense of irony. To have a sense of irony ensures humility. Even in your moments of purest, honest intention, there is a sense in which you do not know and can never know what it is that you are actually doing. There is an opaque backdrop to even the clearest action. In everything we do and say, we risk encounter with the unknown. Often its ways are not our ways, and only at the end do we see the deeper meaning of our actions. Certain longings want tenancy of your heart; when you succumb to these, you betray your deeper, eternal longing. You need to remain open, yet maintain discernment and critical vigilance. Critical openness is true hospitality and receptivity.
Longing Keeps Your Sense of Life Kindled
The value of such openness is that it permits a crucial distance between you and the activity of your life in the world. It keeps a certain inner solitude clear, so that you remain aware of a primordial longing of life rising in you. Longing in this sense is not a search for gratification or pleasure. This longing is the primal presence of your own vitality. It is the sense of life in you which makes you feel alive. Psychology, philosophy, or religion rarely refer to the “sense of life.” They concern themselves with the outer meaning of the world, the inner meaning of the soul, and the threshold where the two meet. This search for meaning is as ancient as the awakening of the first question; it is as new and urgent as the question that is troubling you now. Without a sense of meaning, life becomes absurd and surrealistic. In our times Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Kafka have explored the possibilities and consequences of taking any human action amid the unpredictable chaos of life.
When your sense of meaning collapses or is violated, it becomes exceptionally difficult to remain creative or even to continue believing in anything. In the Siberian Gulag, prisoners were forced victims of absurdity. They were forced to do tasks that involved hard labour in the freezing cold. Regardless of how minimal and slight a task might be, the human mind always desires that the task have some significance. The Gulag prisoners were often forced to move hundreds of tons of stones from a pile to another location some miles away. Each day, in the freezing cold, each prisoner filled his wheelbarrow and slowly wheeled barrow after barrow of rock to the other location. You can imagine their sense of satisfaction as over the weeks the new rock pile began to grow from the transported stone. Every stone was earned. On the very day that all the stones were transferred, the guards made the prisoners begin to bring the stones back again to reconstruct the original pile in the same place. This forced absurdity would eat into the coherence and break the secret belonging of any mind.
Each Person Incarnates Longing
Our quest for meaning, though often unacknowledged, is what secretly sustains our passion and guides our instinct and action. Our need to find meaning is urged upon us by our sense of life. Normally, when we look at people, whether at work, on the street, or in our homes, we inevitably think of them in practical terms. We experience other people very concretely. We notice the way they look, the role they play, the clothes they wear, the habits they have, and especially the styles of their personalities.
Yet when you distance yourself from the particularities of individual lives, you begin to realize that no human person is here on earth accidentally or neutrally. Each person is a living world of longing. You are here not simply because you were sent here. You are here because you long to be here. A person is an incarnation of longing. Behind your image, role, personality, and deeper than your thoughts, there is a pulse of desire that sustains you in the world. All your thoughts, feelings, and actions arise from a secret source within you which desires life. This is where your sense of life is rooted. Your sense of life expresses itself in your convictions, intentions, and passions; it precedes them. Your sense of life is pre-reflective, yet passionate and powerful. This secret presence of longing helps you endure the routine of the daily round; it emerges strongly when difficulty entangles you, or when suffering strips away your networks of connection with the world. Your sense of life is not something you can invent or force with your mind. It is the wisdom of your clay and is eternally acquainted with awakening. As you discover the faithfulness of life within you, your sense of life transfigures your fear and assures you that you are more deeply rooted than you realize. It frees you for the adventure of solitude.