Half of us want to live the unexamined life, assimilating easily into the culture, the conventions and the perks of the time. And half don’t. We want to write our own marching orders, to look and ponder, to surmise and re-evaluate.
It’s not so easy, though, to be an original, to create a life of your own design, to parse, weight and scale where and how you can best contribute. Whether you’ve always had in mind this intention—and even see it as an obligation or, startled, realized that too much of your life “just happened,” there’s much to think about, plan for and do.
Think about it. When you choose to create a life of your own design, you must accommodate all those commitments already undertaken. There’s the normal pressure of what’s expected of you, of course, the standard exterior clash of wills with those who have claims upon you or those upon whom you make claim. What do you owe those who contribute to your support? And what do you owe those who depend on you? And then there are, of course, the ever-vigilant conventions and rules that apply to you and everyone else, no matter what.
But you must also come to grips with all the conflicting data that surrounds the examined life. How do you honestly know your own mind and the calls upon it? Can it really “stand back” and examine itself?
What’s possible for you? What makes you tick? What excites your imagination? In your encounter with this vast and complex land of ours, guiding and governing yourself is the highest possible originative response to the demand for contribution, order and the day-to-day creation of faith and hope and possibility. What wants doing and what needs doing?
So, while there’s a great need to know your mind, it’s not neatly organized with all the deepest, wisest ideas at the top and the lesser ones ranked below. Add to that the mind’s off-and-on-again temptation to just keep going with the daily toil, with how you were already inserted into the world, with the march of programmed events. Creating an autonomous life takes nerve, will, energy and resolute purpose.
This means that the clash of wills can be interior, too. Strengths and goals reached may conflict with sensibilities and longings not yet achieved. And what does life insist you settle for and what’s just too dreadful or shallow to endure? When can you lend grace and affinity to the everyday chores that ordinary life seems to demand? And when must you exceed the ordinary?
And what of romance and passion and your wild-with-happiness dreams? Do you forfeit subjective independence and the thrill of new horizons for the arousing appeal of intimacy, connection and belonging? Or do you forfeit some of the home front comforts of life to go with your new and exciting understanding of intention, accountability and meaning? Or need nothing be forfeited?
And think about all the other claims upon your mind. Your heart—its glorious highs and stupefying lows. Your personality—its moods, anxieties, quirks and attitudes. Your intellect’s attraction to wisdom, virtue and justice. The aims of your intuition, imagination and the deep and haunting experience of the “soul.”
Or are these, in effect, inert, in need of a jump start? Will everyday life be much better lived if you just put your mind to a little remodeling and upgrading of its furniture? Or is the future truly up for grabs—this being the first time that you’ve lent your eyes and ears (and mind) to such possibilities?
There’s more. How do you make sense of life’s ironies, contingencies and uncertainties; of your own entangled and unpredictable emotions; of inbuilt and exterior competing claims for what’s valuable and meaningful; of what you ought to do and what you want to do? How do you put to right the inescapable personal responsibility for choosing your outlook on the world, as well as your conduct in it, along with your compassionate comprehension that many people could not escape becoming what was done to them? The existential and material privileges that have brought you to this opportunity—to stand apart from your conditioning and circumstance, to question, examine, reconsider, evaluate and commit—have not been available to everyone.
Along the same lines, what of your public obligations? Responding to the highest order of demand for transcendence, for self-determination, self-control and self-government, for studying a body of intelligence and a network of reference points designed to support morally, civilly and rationally qualified authority, has been the basis of spiritual progress and social decency.
Life has been described with thousands of metaphors, all the way from life is a chocolate cake to life is a nightmare from which we never awaken. I think of life as a never-ending series of choices. We can just yoke ourselves into the grim hardheartedness of the marketplace and the harsh critical lights of the Scoreboard, in hopes that success therein will make life meaningful, but it’s a bad bet, a poor choice. No amount of stuff can ever satisfy what only an inner transformation can do.
Moreover, as I said in my most recent post, with this transformed realization of ourselves, we feel inspired, vibrantly alive and in command of the way in which we wish to live out our lives. And when we undertake this commitment, our transcendent or willed display of thoughtfulness, connection and affinity puts us on the right side of history.