I am living every day trying to figure out how a single adult can live meaningfully, contentedly, not just following convention, but finding things that actually leave me with the sense that my life matters. I do this because it is a question my life continues to raise, since I don't feel myself remotely drawn to conventional standards of success, things like a cool sounding career or lots of money or stability. I'm sure married people with children could ask the same questions, but I assume that devoting your entire life to loving a person and forming/nurturing little human beings are self-evidently the most important/valuable things one could ever accomplish, no matter how much difficulty they entail.
Anyway. I have been living with these 4 things for the past year or so, and I feel like they have held up, whenever I feel a little blue or empty or aimless, I return to my little quadrilateral and go about regaining whichever elements I'm missing, and they put me back on track. Are you ready? Here is the quadrilateral:
1) Beauty - I need beauty in my life to feel happy. It inspires me, it feeds my creative energy, it seems to be the point of everything. This includes any assortment of the following: seeing beautiful places, taking pretty pictures, reading poetry, good music, or even going out for a wild night and talking to strangers, by which I mean living a poetic night. not being afraid to shamelessly love beauty and poetry, no matter how uncool it seems to love a thing, to be excited about life, to read the world poetically, seeing patterns in my life or friends' lives across time, taking the time to observe the stories lived around me, the ways people are becoming and living into sweetness. If you were going to make this point into a verb it would be: to look, observe. Not only to surround yourself with obviously beautiful things, but to actively observe the beauty that is hiding around us, and in our histories.
2) Learning - This is obvious, yes? to be constantly learning, collecting information about the universe, not just through books (although yes through books), but through engaging the world each day like a new thing, like a teacher, engaging everyone and everything like a teacher, my difficulties and griefs, my nemeses, my annoyances, my good friends, trees, butterflies, and so on, all are teachers. I am not always good at this one, but it's a thing I want to reach for, to be always willing to change, to let new information reorient my life, it is so easy to become stale and solid and assume the things you know are right. I want to always be humble enough to be proved wrong, and I want to be always always accumulating wisdom. This is also tricky, because as we accumulate more knowing, it becomes harder to entertain new opinions, to let ourselves be undone by an idea that never occurred to us, because it makes all our accumulated knowing feel like a waste. This leads us to insist that we are right!, that we know the world!, and that our knowing has made us better. The truth is that it has made us better, but we are all always in various stages of becoming, and as soon as we stop becoming, our story stops, and we become insufferable to be around. Of course, discerning which things really have something new to teach you - and what that something is - is an important part of the equation, but I want to be always listening carefully to the world and the things.
3) Love - By which I mean both connection and adoration. I have worried at times that my life is lacking in love, because I go through phases of having less people around, or of having only the lightest relationships, full of fun but no depth, and of course, because I don't have a spouse or baby around to pour love into all day everyday. But then I read this line in Rilke, it said something like "I want to love the things as no one has ever thought to love them," and it occurred to me that I always have the capacity to love, that this, like finding beauty, is an active ability that I can develop, and that even if it feels like a meager consolation, loving the things is enriching in the same way as romantic loving, it makes me focus outward, it opens my life to beauty, it softens and enlivens me. The point is that I want to engage everything and everyone with love, and I'm not going to wait around for a date before I get busy loving. Of course, even saying all that, it also means I want to be always looking for connection, and if I feel myself in a dry spell for very long, I know it's time to venture out and find a place to connect, volunteer with a church, start a book club, join the peace corp, whatever.
4) Creation - Creation is the fruit of all these other things. I think it's obvious that human beings have a drive to create, that it's an essential part of happiness, to have a work of some sort. Craig calls it "the compulsion to reenact the creation myth," but he goes to Harvard. I think when people talk about having a career, they are pointing to their desire to create, but the problem is that careers also involve money-making and prestige and these sorts of things, which are distractions I think. The most important thing to me is that we continue to find ways to create, whether we're making babies or painting pictures or writing songs or building libraries in Africa or even just crafting a full and meaningful life, it can be tiny project after tiny project, or we can make our lives into one grand project, or we can string the tiny projects into a grand project, there are lots of configurations. Creating is the one that's hardest for me, because it takes such work, and consuming is so much easier. It's hardest, but I suspect it may also be the most important, and I have felt its absence in the past year or two. I have no excuses, but I keep trying to thrust myself into working at some form of creation, writing songs or stories, and I plan to keep trying until it works.
Anyway, here is another thesis statement of my life, these 4 things. Here is where I am now, here is how I see thangs. I just wanted to say.
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