The Path
Carl Jung said, “What did you do as a child that made the hours pass like minutes? Therein lies the key to your earthly pursuits.” The Bhagavad Gita says “it is better to fail at your own life than to succeed at someone else’s.” Sri Prem Baba tells us to ask, “How much do I really want to give myself? How much do I really want to serve? How much do I really want to serve through my gifts and talents? How much do I want to serve God who lives in the other? In short: How much do I want to serve God who lives in the other through my gifts and talents?” At the intersection of these three quotes, I believe there is a very beautiful truth: That each of us is unique, and that uniqueness is both intended, and intended to be altruistic: that the loves life gave us are meant to be the gifts we give to life to show our love.
Seen in this way, our work is not the means by which we protect ourselves from the world, but rather the way in which we give ourselves to the world. I suspect, by living to give ourselves away, we find that we are not something that needs to be protected: we discover a security in life that we could never possibly secure by seeking it. Alan Watts said “the desire for security and insecurity are the same thing… To hold your breath is to lose your breath.” Such a life, no doubt, requires great courage, but courage is the natural result of faith, and faith is fuelled by wisdom. I suspect that if we can convince ourselves of the truth that life is meant to be given away, then we will find the courage to actually do it.
Life is scary because we imagine it stretching on forever. We only really protect ourselves from time. Right now we are safe; the farther our minds wander from the present moment, the more insecure we find ourselves feeling. If we could find a way to live with ourselves right now, as we are, there would be no room for worry. And I do not think worry is ever really productive. Worry produces solutions to itself, but I question whether the assuagement of our worry is what we actually want from life. I think there is something deeper, and though we can go on appeasing fear indefinitely, this only serves to obscure the real joy we are meant to live with (“leap to the heavens of the love indicated to me,” as Walt Whitman said). Life is much shorter than we think. We do not have to protect ourselves from forever. Time weighs much less than now.
But life is also longer than we think, and there is such scope for change and possibility. We cannot see the path intended for us, but we can always perceive the next step. I think to live in this way - with one eye on the path and one eye on the view, but no thought at all for the destination - is brave and wise. Things probably will take care of themselves; our job is to be happy, and love. At least that is the way I want to approach things. I think if you set out with the opposite view, then you doom yourself from the start: even if you win, you lose. It is like Pascal’s Wager: if you think life is terrifying, whether you are right or wrong, you will live in fear of it. But if you think life is divine, there is a chance you might be right, and you will escape envy and dread.
Halldór Laxness, my favourite author at the moment, started writing when he was five. He grew up in a croft in the Icelandic countryside: his family lived a hard life that demanded everything of all of them, but somehow little Halldór was excluded from the farm labour. Clearly his destiny was written all over him. He wrote all day every day from a young age. An old friend told a story in 1955, when Laxness won the Nobel Prize, that he had once visited the Laxness family at noon one summer day, knocked on the door, and called. After a few minutes a ten-year-old Laxness appeared at the door, eyes dreamy with stories, and informed the man that “nobody was home.” The man thought this was a strange thing to say; Laxness disappeared again into his house. His passion became his work, and his work was his gift to the world.
The painter Camille Corot said at the end of his life that he “hoped there would be painting in Heaven.” He had spent his whole life mastering painting, and didn’t want to stop. I know some people who would probably want to take their work with them into the sky. They are all happy. They live with energy and magic; they are unafraid. I imagine Warren Buffett hopes there will be a market in Heaven; Kelly Slater probably prays for waves; I know some wonderful women and men who hope they will have friends to take care of; my meditation teacher will ask for a 7am sitting every day in eternity; I suppose Pavarotti made a deal with God that he would be allowed to sing at Vespers.
I heard a beautiful story recently about a depressed but very wealthy old man who went to see a therapist. When the therapist asked how he had made his fortune, he said he had designed medical devices. He had been a tinkerer since childhood (the kind of kid who takes clocks apart and puts them back together again), had become an engineer, and patented several lucrative inventions. But he had been too dedicated to his work, his family had fallen apart, and in old age he felt lonely and disillusioned. To cut a long story short, the therapist did some research, found a woman whose life had been saved by a device the man had invented, and set up a dinner to introduce them, to which the woman invited a hundred people whose lives had been touched because the woman had survived. At the end of the dinner, the therapist asked the man how many of these medical devices he had sold, and he replied something in the order of 100,000. Which is to say, his hobby had touched and improved ten million lives.
I think the final step in finding one’s life’s work is learning to see its significance. Jung said that Western man suffers severely because he has no myth by which to live, no overarching story to give his life significance. How much happier would that old man have been if he’d known that by his gifts and passions he was saving millions of lives? Perhaps it would have given him the energy to save more.
No sincere desire is ever selfish. We long to be happy, and find that our happiness engenders the happiness of others. Happiness, love, and creativity follow rules inverse to money: the more love you give, the more love you have; the happier you are, the happier you will make others. The selfless thing to do is to do what we love doing. That is our gift. True gifts have no beginning and no end: there is no giver or recipient; there is only giving, and we are lost in it. Lost in giving, we find ourselves, and give ourselves away.
Windmill on the Cote de Picardie, near Versailles
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot