Читать книгу AutoBioPhilosophy: An intimate story of what it means to be human - Robert Smith Rowland - Страница 39

The overarching question that guides this book is, ‘What does it mean to be human?’ While tracking a life, in this case mine, along a more or less straight line, each chapter offers a different tangent to that question. The tangent suggested in the last chapter was that of standing in the flow of life. As if planting one’s feet in a river, being human means feeling the past of the species surge up behind us, while sensing its urge to flow onwards. None of us is more than a boulder in the onward mission of the life force.

In this new chapter, I shall crop that trans-generational view down to an individual life span. How do we make our allotted time on earth meaningful? We do so, I believe, by identifying and pursuing a purpose. By ‘purpose’ I mean more than doing what we have to do to survive. One of the elements that makes us human is that we are capable of going beyond meeting our immediate needs for survival. Of course, we don’t always have the luxury of doing that. Sometimes survival is the best that we can hope for. Think of refugees or people living on the breadline. Once our basic needs have been met, however, we naturally want to optimise our lives, to make them go as well as possible.

That we can do in one of two ways. Either we try to make our lives more comfortable or we try to make them more meaningful. In reality, the choice isn’t black and white: we’ll make trade-offs between the two. To use an obvious example, we might take a job with a charity that doesn’t pay so well because we want to make a difference; but we stop short of giving away all our earnings in order to maintain a standard of living. Thus we strike the balance between meaning and comfort that feels right for us. Often we find that balance intuitively, without explicitly posing the question. It’s an intuition that we all possess, this knowing whether we are driven more by meaning or by comfort.

The lucky few manage to square the circle. A human rights lawyer will have meaningful work while enjoying a pretty decent lifestyle. A smaller minority still will pursue personal comfort with no regard for meaning at all. To use another obvious example: bankers. For such groups, there is perhaps a hidden cost to be paid, however. Not only can gaining money go together with losing meaning, but in the process the conscience may become restive. In the blinkered pursuit of wealth, the desires of the self eclipse the needs of the soul to such a degree that, in the darkness, doubts about one’s very goodness as a human being may arise. An excess of comfort can feel uncomfortable. The thicker the mattress, the greater the chance of a pea.

I was given my own sense of purpose through those twin occupations of studying for my finals and being a parent. They filled the crater that had opened up when I dropped out and went to live in France with no life-plan to speak of. As it turned out, my studies provided a purpose that would sustain me beyond the immediate challenge of preparing for my exams.