Punctuation marks
Some friends of mine from the UK came to visit recently and we spent a fantastic week exploring Jerusalem and other places in Israel, hanging out, catching up, seeing the sights, eating (my word, was there a lot of eating) and having a good old time (of which more on another day). They left a week ago and as I settled in to the regular rhythm of life here, I looked at the calendar for the next big event, which is my return to old England for Christmas in December. And that got me to thinking, in a roundabout way, about the events and people and situations that punctuate our everyday lives. And that then got me to asking bigger questions about the meaning of life. Now, I appreciate this sounds a little serious for a blog in which I normally ramble about the vagaries of life as an ex-pat in Jerusalem, but it's been preoccupying me for a few months now so I've decided to share my musing and ponderings with the interwebs. Without wanting to sound like a first-year philosophy undergraduate, I have of late been asking myself the question "What is the point?" The point of life, I mean.
One of my favourite quotes is this one:
"My question- that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide – was the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man…..a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: is there meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?"
Tolstoy wrote those words, in 'A Confession', and for some reason at the moment they are really resonating with me. Obviously, this is the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man and woman, but I'm not going to diss Tolstoy's lack of feminist credentials because his basic point is a good one. Is life really just a succession of everyday boring stuff, punctuated by more interesting events and incidences, leading up to that moment when the Angel of Death shows up to whisk us away to whatever lies beyond? What are the things that bring meaning and purpose to my life? Is it my job? Is it my relationships - with my family, my friends, my colleagues, my students? Is it that one, elusive relationship that Hollywood tells us is essential for our inner wellbeing and which will, when it happens, magically make our lives perfect? (I feel at this point that I should mention the fact that Disney gave me unrealistic expectations of love.) What if, to quote Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, this really is as good as it gets?
I went to a university reunion a few years ago and was struck even then by the number of conversations I had that night which followed a pretty basic formula: "Well, I left here, got a job in the City/in management consultancy/as a doctor/in the foreign office"; "Now that I've got that promotion, I'm looking to buy a house"; "xyz and I are getting married next year"; "We're expecting baby number 1/2/3 early next year". It's like these are the punctuation marks that make life meaningful. You leave university; you get a job; you get a better job; you climb the ladder; you meet someone and get married; you raise a family; you get another, better job; you watch your children grow up and go to university; you retire; you play a lot of golf/go travelling/read books; you die. But what happens if you skip some of those punctuation marks, if they don't happen for you? What if you screw up and lose your job? What happens if you get breast cancer in your forties? What if you don't get any points on the grown-up scale (TM Anne Le Brocq, c. 2005) and don't achieve any of the things society places so much value on?
I, for example, am 33 and unmarried, so a fair proportion of those milestones that give meaning to life are apparently missing from mine. Several years ago I bumped into a friend from university at Paddington station, waiting for a train, and so we spent a few minutes catching up before Great Western Railways rudely interrupted our chat. I had recently been promoted in my job at my last school and was relaying to him my career plans (to advance into senior management and hopefully, one day, to become a headteacher somewhere - ambitious, perhaps, but a very real dream of mine) when he interrupted me and said, "And of course you'll get married and have children." I looked at him with astonishment - I was, in fact, genuinely baffled by that scorching display of gender stereotypes - and said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster, "Yes, of course, because that's what all women long for: a husband and children to bring meaning and purpose to their life." I think he realised he'd aggravated my latent feminism at that point and he backtracked swiftly, but the underlying issue remains with me still, that there is an assumption that marriage and children are essential for a meaningful life. To be honest, at that stage in my mid-twenties I was so focussed on my career that the prospect of marriage, whilst desirable, was fairly low down my list of priorities.
Now, this is not meant to sound like the bitter rant of a spinster in her early thirties but given the weight given to the married state by the western world (actually, the whole world) to have that particular punctuation point missing gives one pause for thought. Someone asked me earlier this year why I wasn't married yet and all I could think of to say was, "I haven't fallen in love yet." In hindsight, maybe the line from Bridget Jones' Diary was more appropriate: "Well, I don't know. I suppose it doesn't help that underneath our clothes our entire bodies are covered in scales." Of course I want to get married; of course it doesn't help that I have scales under my clothes; it probably didn't help that I spent the majority of my twenties working like mad, climbing that career ladder, when a lot of guys find that rather intimidating in a woman. Be that as it may, here I sit, unmarried. If this was the 1800s I would be condemned to life as an 'old maid', looking after the small children of distant relatives and hoping that someone will leave me some money so that I don't die, penniless, in the workhouse. Thank heavens for women's rights.
But it's not just the marriage question that vexes me so. If the punctuation points in life are things like holidays and promotions and houses and big birthdays, what is the point of the rest of it? One of my favourite books is called The Dust Diaries. Written by a Welsh poet, Owen Sheers, it traces the history of his great-uncle, a missionary in Rhodesia, following both his story and that of Sheers as he digs into his great-uncle's life in order to learn more about the kind of man he was. Much of the book consists of his imaginings of the life his great-uncle led; there's no way he can know for sure but he makes the best guess he can (in beautiful, wistful prose - seriously, it's the most wonderful book). He sums up what I think I'm trying to get at as follows:
"It is these intimate diaries of our lives that tell the true history. The emotions that pass in a moment like light passing over skin, the seams of thought layered deep in our minds at every instant, the impulses, observations, nuances. The daily epiphanies, the tone and timbre of a voice, the fleeting expression of a face, the few breaths alone, head craned back studying the stars in a black sky. But these diaries of our lives are written in dust; they are not what remain."
Our lives are made up of more than just punctuation points; the meaning we find in our lives has to come from something more profound but at the same time more everyday than marriage/children/work/holidays. The dust diaries of our lives contain so many experiences that cannot be recorded because they are so fleeting. Is that where the meaning comes from? In a conversation with a friend where you're laughing so much your sides start hurting? In the 30 seconds you took out of your walk to work to stroke a dog that someone is walking? In the daily back-and-forth of teaching teenagers, not really sure whether you're having an impact, either in the short- or long-term, but plugging away anyway because it has to be worth it eventually and most of them are pretty entertaining? The bottom line, as Tolstoy says, is whether what I do here and now matters in any way beyond the humdrum of my daily life. I've written before about my faith in God, shaky as it sometimes is, and these questions I pose here are questions I've been bringing before God for a while now. The Bible says that God has plans for us, to give us hope and a future; it implies that the things that we do every day do matter, even if they aren't earth-shatteringly significant, even if my life doesn't have all the traditional punctuation marks that seem to bring significance and meaning. I really don't have answers to these questions, even after all this wittering. But I'm looking for meaning in life and I'm hoping I find it somewhere. In the interim, I'm just going to keep enjoying the sunset from my balcony.
Phew. I really hope this hasn't sounded too pretentious. Next time on A Brunskill Abroad, the comedy value to be found in the average Israeli man's stock move on the dance-floor; and the fun to be had with five friends, five cameras and an abandoned mosque somewhere near the border with Syria.
One of my favourite quotes is this one:
"My question- that which at the age of fifty brought me to the verge of suicide – was the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man…..a question without an answer to which one cannot live. It was: “What will come of what I am doing today or tomorrow? What will come of my whole life? Why should I live, why wish for anything, or do anything?” It can also be expressed thus: is there meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?"
Tolstoy wrote those words, in 'A Confession', and for some reason at the moment they are really resonating with me. Obviously, this is the simplest of questions lying in the soul of every man and woman, but I'm not going to diss Tolstoy's lack of feminist credentials because his basic point is a good one. Is life really just a succession of everyday boring stuff, punctuated by more interesting events and incidences, leading up to that moment when the Angel of Death shows up to whisk us away to whatever lies beyond? What are the things that bring meaning and purpose to my life? Is it my job? Is it my relationships - with my family, my friends, my colleagues, my students? Is it that one, elusive relationship that Hollywood tells us is essential for our inner wellbeing and which will, when it happens, magically make our lives perfect? (I feel at this point that I should mention the fact that Disney gave me unrealistic expectations of love.) What if, to quote Jack Nicholson in As Good as it Gets, this really is as good as it gets?
I went to a university reunion a few years ago and was struck even then by the number of conversations I had that night which followed a pretty basic formula: "Well, I left here, got a job in the City/in management consultancy/as a doctor/in the foreign office"; "Now that I've got that promotion, I'm looking to buy a house"; "xyz and I are getting married next year"; "We're expecting baby number 1/2/3 early next year". It's like these are the punctuation marks that make life meaningful. You leave university; you get a job; you get a better job; you climb the ladder; you meet someone and get married; you raise a family; you get another, better job; you watch your children grow up and go to university; you retire; you play a lot of golf/go travelling/read books; you die. But what happens if you skip some of those punctuation marks, if they don't happen for you? What if you screw up and lose your job? What happens if you get breast cancer in your forties? What if you don't get any points on the grown-up scale (TM Anne Le Brocq, c. 2005) and don't achieve any of the things society places so much value on?
I, for example, am 33 and unmarried, so a fair proportion of those milestones that give meaning to life are apparently missing from mine. Several years ago I bumped into a friend from university at Paddington station, waiting for a train, and so we spent a few minutes catching up before Great Western Railways rudely interrupted our chat. I had recently been promoted in my job at my last school and was relaying to him my career plans (to advance into senior management and hopefully, one day, to become a headteacher somewhere - ambitious, perhaps, but a very real dream of mine) when he interrupted me and said, "And of course you'll get married and have children." I looked at him with astonishment - I was, in fact, genuinely baffled by that scorching display of gender stereotypes - and said, with as much sarcasm as I could muster, "Yes, of course, because that's what all women long for: a husband and children to bring meaning and purpose to their life." I think he realised he'd aggravated my latent feminism at that point and he backtracked swiftly, but the underlying issue remains with me still, that there is an assumption that marriage and children are essential for a meaningful life. To be honest, at that stage in my mid-twenties I was so focussed on my career that the prospect of marriage, whilst desirable, was fairly low down my list of priorities.
Now, this is not meant to sound like the bitter rant of a spinster in her early thirties but given the weight given to the married state by the western world (actually, the whole world) to have that particular punctuation point missing gives one pause for thought. Someone asked me earlier this year why I wasn't married yet and all I could think of to say was, "I haven't fallen in love yet." In hindsight, maybe the line from Bridget Jones' Diary was more appropriate: "Well, I don't know. I suppose it doesn't help that underneath our clothes our entire bodies are covered in scales." Of course I want to get married; of course it doesn't help that I have scales under my clothes; it probably didn't help that I spent the majority of my twenties working like mad, climbing that career ladder, when a lot of guys find that rather intimidating in a woman. Be that as it may, here I sit, unmarried. If this was the 1800s I would be condemned to life as an 'old maid', looking after the small children of distant relatives and hoping that someone will leave me some money so that I don't die, penniless, in the workhouse. Thank heavens for women's rights.
But it's not just the marriage question that vexes me so. If the punctuation points in life are things like holidays and promotions and houses and big birthdays, what is the point of the rest of it? One of my favourite books is called The Dust Diaries. Written by a Welsh poet, Owen Sheers, it traces the history of his great-uncle, a missionary in Rhodesia, following both his story and that of Sheers as he digs into his great-uncle's life in order to learn more about the kind of man he was. Much of the book consists of his imaginings of the life his great-uncle led; there's no way he can know for sure but he makes the best guess he can (in beautiful, wistful prose - seriously, it's the most wonderful book). He sums up what I think I'm trying to get at as follows:
"It is these intimate diaries of our lives that tell the true history. The emotions that pass in a moment like light passing over skin, the seams of thought layered deep in our minds at every instant, the impulses, observations, nuances. The daily epiphanies, the tone and timbre of a voice, the fleeting expression of a face, the few breaths alone, head craned back studying the stars in a black sky. But these diaries of our lives are written in dust; they are not what remain."
Our lives are made up of more than just punctuation points; the meaning we find in our lives has to come from something more profound but at the same time more everyday than marriage/children/work/holidays. The dust diaries of our lives contain so many experiences that cannot be recorded because they are so fleeting. Is that where the meaning comes from? In a conversation with a friend where you're laughing so much your sides start hurting? In the 30 seconds you took out of your walk to work to stroke a dog that someone is walking? In the daily back-and-forth of teaching teenagers, not really sure whether you're having an impact, either in the short- or long-term, but plugging away anyway because it has to be worth it eventually and most of them are pretty entertaining? The bottom line, as Tolstoy says, is whether what I do here and now matters in any way beyond the humdrum of my daily life. I've written before about my faith in God, shaky as it sometimes is, and these questions I pose here are questions I've been bringing before God for a while now. The Bible says that God has plans for us, to give us hope and a future; it implies that the things that we do every day do matter, even if they aren't earth-shatteringly significant, even if my life doesn't have all the traditional punctuation marks that seem to bring significance and meaning. I really don't have answers to these questions, even after all this wittering. But I'm looking for meaning in life and I'm hoping I find it somewhere. In the interim, I'm just going to keep enjoying the sunset from my balcony.
Phew. I really hope this hasn't sounded too pretentious. Next time on A Brunskill Abroad, the comedy value to be found in the average Israeli man's stock move on the dance-floor; and the fun to be had with five friends, five cameras and an abandoned mosque somewhere near the border with Syria.
Ooh, my first citation for the grown-up scale! I'd almost forgotten about it.
ReplyDeleteA good view from a balcony does help...