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Sep 26
2007
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Thoughts on the Meaning of Life...Posted by Gabe Knipp in writing, thomas merton, meaning of life |
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I spend a good amount of my time writing, which is really kind of masochistic, since there is an inordinate share of rejection. You wonder to yourselves why most writers are neurotic, paranoid, chain-smoking wrecks: because they spend all of themselveson a poem or story or piece and then it gets rejected by the first editor, and the second, and the third. I read recently that the average short story gets rejected twenty times before it gets accepted.
Dan Brown sold books out of the trunk of his car for years before The Da Vinci Code made it big.
Not that I'm asking for pity. I choose this path of rejection, and really, while most people are driving to work I sit at home with a big cup of coffee and my thoughts. I largely set my own schedule. And, there's always the chance that you do hit it big - The Da Vinci Code - and don't really have to work for the rest of your life. There's not that same home run opportunity, in say, managing a shoe store.
But it also means that I occasionally mope around, wondering what I did to deserve all this, bemoaning the fact that my life will never amount to anything (also, writers can be the slightest bit melodramatic). This morning, as I was going through my weekly moping, I opened a Thomas Merton book, No Man Is An Island.
Merton talks about spirituality, and he was a Trappist monk, so I figure he spent a good amount of time thinking about spirituality. At least, more than the average American. So, I read him from time to time hoping to gain insight and realize that my life isn't as pointless as it seems.
He wrote in the prologue, and I'll paraphrase, since it takes about twenty minutes to read one of his sentences (if you think I use commas too much, wow): No matter how despairing life seems, it is this despair that tells us life has meaning. If the meaning of life were simple and easy to achieve, or if there was no meaning, either one would render life fairly dull and pointless. We'd either achieve our meaning early on and have nothing to live for, or there really would be nothing to live for. It's the struggle that keeps us going.
It's thoughts like this that make me really hate Thomas Merton.
I was really hoping he might have something else to say. Actually, I was hoping he might say that the meaning of my life was to play FIFA Soccer on Xbox, since I just borrowed the game from a friend. But, I guess what he says makes sense.
It's like in Iraq. There's all the actual fighting going on, and the fight for a more diplomatic resolution, and the fight in Congress. But there's all the fighting because peace is a great, amazing thing. And great amazing things don't just happen, you have to work for them.
And, maybe, the meaning of life is a great amazing thing. For those few moments in a month when I find it, like putting the period on a fantastic story, or surprising my wife with a great dinner, or serving lunch at a soup kitchen downtown, it does feel like a great thing.
But it comes around rather infrequently, if you ask me.
That's the idea, though. It's the rejection letter, the feeling of frustration, the lay offs at work, the argument with your friend: these are the things that move us forward. These are the things that make us search.
I keep writing. And I keep feeling frustrated, sometimes hopeless. But this morning I am reminded why I sometimes feel that way.
I wonder what will remind me next week.
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