I Don't Presume To Know the Meaning of Life

I’ve been trying and failing for the last two days to solve all the world’s problems in a tidy little thousand-word package of twelve-point type. I feel like every different thing that is wrong needs at least ten thousand words devoted to it that can be crafted better than mine would. I don’t think I have what it takes to fix this.

The world is scarier than it has ever been in my lifetime and I am enraged and stunned daily. Meanwhile, my cat is morbidly obese and can’t clean her bum. My house is a mess and I’m convinced that not only is your house cleaner than mine, it also makes you a better person. In a completely impotent form of protest, I refuse to pay Comcast on time. I work too much. My health is slipping. My attention is fractioned to the point of deficit.

I wanted to write you an inspirational and humorous essay. I wanted to entertain you, make you feel something tug in your gut, compel you into some sort of meaningful personal action that I’d never see. It’s arrogant of me to think I deserve that kind of influence over you, that my arrangement of artfully chosen five-dollar words would somehow be that powerful. I haven’t earned that, and you certainly didn’t sign up to read one thousand words dredged in self-congratulatory sanctimony.

Sometimes I wonder how Lutheran minister Reinhold Niebuhr would feel about how his Serenity Prayer and its evolution in our vernacular. The full prayer is a simple and rather beautiful meditation on letting go, which has long since fallen out of fashion as people now half-kiddingly pray for the serenity not to kill a motherfucker. But the part that I think is the real meat of the prayer is probably the most overlooked — not the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, not the courage to change the things I can, but the wisdom to know the difference.

Here is the only thing I’ve ever learned that matters, the one pearl of wisdom I have to impart: I can control only myself, nothing else. Every attempt to influence or control anything beyond the boundaries of my skin is based purely in my selfish desire to make the world fit my image for it. Sure, sometimes selfishness can look pretty good on paper: wanting to help others, fighting for justice, trying to manifest a better world according to my terms and conditions. But mostly it is a fruitless exercise that only frustrates and confounds me while alienating those I try to bend to my will, no matter how altruistic my intentions.

With all our learning and understanding and psychology and industry, we are still slaves to a consciousness that can only assure us of our existence. We are still inside the matrix. When you zoom out to that view from outer space, where you can see the clouds moving over the continents and oceans, you can’t see me, my messy house, my fat cat. You can’t see my fears about my job and my health, the angst that keeps me awake at night, the money I throw at charities to assuage my liberal guilt.

These worries that you can’t see from outer space consume me. They consume all of us, but they are worthless in the bigger picture. We are like ants busying ourselves with the industry of civilization, but ultimately none of it really means much or makes a significant mark on the world. Generation after generation, we are sitting around an eternal campfire telling ourselves stories to pass the time until we die.

And this is okay.

I truly have no idea what I’m doing. I am making all of this up as I go — this essay, this life — and in my more rational moments I comfort myself by saying that you are, too. In the darkest, loneliest moments I’m convinced that I am somehow the only one who didn’t get the instruction manual and am squandering every shot I’ve ever had at a meaningful existence.

But in the light of day, I’m pretty sure that we’re all winging it. Thousands of years of human existence, of our spiritual, cultural, and social evolution have not yet distilled into a simple set of easy-to-follow instructions on how to capture that meaningful existence. How would we ever agree on a single set of instructions? When pressed, we wage wars over every notion of how to be alive on this planet, with each side saying theirs is the better, more righteous way.

Our consciousness only provides awareness — of self, the world around us, a framework for our sensory experience. What it doesn’t give us is meaning, and that’s the struggle, the thing we’re all desperate for. The mother of all unanswered questions: Why Are We Here? I don’t know why we’re here; I don’t presume to know the meaning of life. At some point in the existentially charged search for meaning, I gave up, surrendered the Why and decided to ask How?

If there is no inherent meaning to our existence as a whole, do I get to decide what my little blip on the timeline of humanity means? If I want my time here to be about something, how do I bring that to life in this hard, unrelenting world?

I think about this continually. After years of contemplation, I’ve found that the Serenity Prayer isn’t about the outer world as much as it is the inner one. When I ask for the wisdom to know the difference, I’m looking for help distinguishing between myself and the rest of the world, remembering the limits of my effectivity and influence. When I accept those boundaries I can achieve the courage to take meaningful action as well as serenity in meaningful inaction. Only then do I have a remote chance of fixing any of this, for myself, for you.

That’s the only thing I know.

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The above is a personal essay submitted to the Yeah Write Super Challenge contest in January 2017. Click here to learn more about Yeah Write.