Religion

ONE --~--

Was There Something I Was Supposed to Do

with My Life?

----~~·----

A SK the average person which is more important to him, making money or being devoted to his family, and virtually everyone will answer family without hesitation. But watch how the average person actually lives out his life. See where he really invests his time and energy, and he will give away the fact that he does not really live by what he says he believes. He has let himself be persuaded that ifhe leaves for work earlier in the moming and comes home more tired at night, he is proving how devoted he is to his family by expending himself to provide them with all the things they have seen advertised.

Ask the average person which means more to her, the approval of strangers or the affection of people closest to her, and she won't be able to understand why you would even ask such a question. Obviously, nothing means more to her than her family and her closest friends. Yet how many of us have embarrassed our children or squelched their spontaneity, for fear of what neighbors or strangers might think? How often have we poured out our anger on those closest to us because we had a hard day at work or someone else did something to upset us? And how many

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

of us have let ourselves become irritable with our famili d

. . k es becaus~ we were 1etmg to ma e ourselves look more attractive to people who do not know us well enough to see beyond appearances?

Ask the average person what he wants out of life, and he will probably reply, "All I want is to be happy." And I believe him. I believe that most people want to be happy. I believe that they work hard at making themselves happy. They buy books, attend classes, change their lifestyles, in an ongoing effort to find that elusive quality, happiness. But in spite of all that, I suspect that most people most of the time do not feel happy.

Why should that sense of happiness be so elusive, elud- ing both those people who get what they want in life and those who don't ? Why should people with so many rea- sons to be happy feel so acutely that something is missing from their lives? Are we asking too much of life when we say, "All I want is to be happy"? Is happiness, like eternal youth or perpetual motion, a goal that we are not meant to reach, no matter how hard we work for it? Or is it possible for people to be happy, but we are going about it in the wrong way?

Oscar Wilde once wrote, "In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants and the 0ther is getting it." He was trying to warn us' that no matt.er h?w hard we work at being successful success won t satisfy us. By the time we get there having ~acrificed so much on the altar of b . ' that success emg successful, we will realize

was not what we t d money and pow k wan e , People who have know and might:ot ~:~e:omething that you and I do not and power do not satisf e even when we are told. ~oney soul. Even the rich a d Y that unnameable hunger m the

n powerful find themselves yearning 16

Was There Something I Was Supposed to Do with My Life?

for something more. We read about the family problems of the rich and famous, we see their fictionalized conflicts on television, but we never get the message. We keep thinking that if we had what they have, we would be happy. No matter how hard we work at being popular and no matter how good we are at it, we never seem to reach the point where we can relax and feel we have arrived. If our sense of who we are depends on popularity and other people's opinions of us, we will always be dependent on those other people. On any day, they have the power to pull the rug out from under us.

I remember reading of a young man who left home to find fame., and fortune in Hollywood. He had three dreams when he set out-to see his name in lights, to own a Rolls-Royce, and to marry a beauty contest winner. By the time he was thirty, he had done all three, and he was a deeply depressed young man, unable to work creatively anymore despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that all of his dreams had come true. By thirty, he had run out of goals. What was there for him to do with the rest of his life?

Several recent authors have written of "the imposter phenomenon," describing the feeling of many apparently successful people that their success is undeserved and that one day people will unmask them for the frauds they are. For all the outward trappings of success, they feel hollow inside. They can never rest and enjoy their accomplish- ments. They need one new success after another. They need constant reassurance from the people around them to still the voice inside them that keeps saying, If other people knew you the way I know you, they would know what a phony you are.

So, the woman who dreamed of marrying a successful

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

doctor or corporate executive and living in a fancy hou in the suburbs may find herself well married and living ~: her dream house but cannot understand why she goes around every morning saying to herself, Is this all there is to life? There has to be something more. She makes lunch dates with friends, works to raise money for charity perhaps opens a boutique, hoping that if she fills her days'. she will also fill the gnawing emptiness in her soul. But n~ matter how busy she keeps herself, the hunger within her is never sated.

Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.

I was reading Carl Jung's book Modern Man in Search of a Soul one day, when I came across several passages which startled me with their insight. They gave me the feeling that a man who lived before I was born knew me better than I knew myself. The first passage was, "About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically define- abl~ n~urosis, ?ut from the senselessness and emptiness of their hves. This can be described as the general neurosis of our time."

1 had to admit that he was right. He was right about the 1980s as surely as he was about the 1920s and 1930s when hfe _wr~te t~ose lines. What frustrates us and robs our lives 0 Joy 1s this absence of · 0 . day Th meamng. ur hves go on day after sur~ or ;~1~:i be successful or unsuccessful, full of plea·

Is th w?rry. But do they mean anything? ere anything more t n h .

eating, sleeping, workin od hi e _t an J_ust being alive- g, an avmg chlldren? Are we no

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Was There Something I Was Suppased to Do with My Life?

different from insects and animals, ex~pt that we are rsed with the ability to ask, What does life mean? and as ~:r as we know, other creatures don't have that problem? It

is a hard question to answer, but an even harder one to avoid answering. For a few y~rs, perhap~, we can p_ut off answering it while we are distracted with educational, career, and marriage decisions. In those early decades, other people have more say in our lives _than we do .. But sooner or later, we will come face to face with the questions, What am I supposed to do with my life? How shall I Jive so that my life will mean something more than a briefflash of biological existence soon to disappear forever?

The curator of a butterfly museum in South Wales once introduced me to the "moth with no mouth," a species of caterpillar that lays its eggs and then changes into a moth that has no digestive system, no way of taking in food, so that it starves to death in a few hours. Nature has designed this moth to reproduce, to lay eggs and pass on the life of the species. Once it has done that, it has no reason to go on living, so it is programmed to die. Are we like that? Do we live only to produce children, to perpetuate the human race? And having done that, is it our destiny to disappear and make way for the next generation? Or is there a purpose to our existence beyond simply existing? Does our being alive matter? Would our disappearance leave the world poorer, or just less crowded? As Jung correctly understood, these are not abstract questions suitable for cocktail party conversation. They are desperately urgent questions. We will find ourselves sick, lonely, and afraid if we cannot answer them.

A man sat opposite me in my study one evening. He had called me the day before for an appointment, sounding agitated and saying only that he had a religious question

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

to discuss with me. In my line of work, a religious question can mean anything from the issue of why God permits evil to the question of where the parents of the groom stand during a wedding ceremony. After some suitably vague remarks about his childhood and his early religious train- ing, he told me what was on his mind.

"Two weeks ago, for the first time in my life I went to the funeral of a man my own age, I didn't know him well, but we worked together, talked to each other from time to time, had kids about the same age. He died suddenly over the weekend. A bunch of us went to the funeral, each of us thinking, It could just as easily have been me. That was two weeks ago. They have already replaced him at the office. I hear his wife is moving out of state to live with her parents. Two weeks ago he was working fifty feet away from me, and now it's as ifhe never existed. It's like a rock falling into a pool of water. For a few seconds, it makes ripples in the water, and then the water is the same as it was before, but the rock isn't there anymore. Rabbi, I've hardly slept at all since then. I can't stop thinking that it could happen to me, that one day it will happen to me, and a few days later I will be forgotten as if I had never lived. Shouldn't a man's life be more than that?"

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no ear to hear it does it make a sound? If a person lives and dies and no on; notices, if the world continues as it was, was that person ever really ahve? I am convinced that it is not the fear of death • of our lives ending, that haunts our sleep so much as the fear that our lives will not have mattered that as far as the world is co d • ' . ncerne , we might as well never have hved What w · · · h · . e miss m our hves, no matter how much we

ave, 1s that sense of meaning. • • •

Was There Something I Was Supposed to Do with My Life?

We may have all the things on our wish list and still feel empty, We may have reached the top of our professions

d still feel that something is missing. We may know that ~~ends and acquaintances envy us, and still feel the ab- sence of true contentment in our lives. So perhaps we have turned to therapy to help fill the void and ground our lives in something firm. We may have remembered that the original, literal meaning of the word "psychotherapy" is "the care and cure of souls," and it is precisely our souls that need caring for. I have personally benefited from therapy at times in my life when I was overwhelmed with problems and needed a skilled outside observer to tell me where I was making things harder for myself. I needed to be told that I was avoiding facing certain truths. In addi- tion, I have used the insights of psychology and psycho- therapy to inform my sermons and to counsel troubled members of my congregation, I know that therapy has value, and that it has values. But the values of the thera• peutic approach tend to be values of adjustment to what is, rather than visions of a world that does not yet exist. A skilled therapist can untangle some of the emotional knots into which we have tied ourselves. He can remove some of the obstacles to our being happy. He can make us .less miserable, but he cannot make us happy. At best, he can bring us back to zero from an emotionally negative situation. He can unblock our ability to live meaningfully, but that is as far as he can take us. When members of my congregation come to me with their personal problems, I make sure to tell them that I am not a trained therapist. I can't do a lot of things that a professional therapist can. But I can offer them something that the therapist cannot: a definition of right and wrong living; a freedom to judge their actions and tell them that something is wrong, mor-

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

ally wrong, not just disfunctional, and that another course of action would be better.

There is an old Yiddish saying, "To a worm in horseradish, the whole world is horseradish." That is, if we have never known an alternative, then we assume that the way we arc living, with all of its frustrations, is the only way to live. We come to believe that life has always involved traffic jams and air pollution. Psychotherapy can help us face up to the fact that the world we live in is horseradish. It can cure us of unrealistic expectations about the world. It can teach us to adjust to this world and be less frustrated by it. But it cannot whisper to us of a world we have never seen or tasted. Psychology can teach us to be normal, but we must look elsewhere for the help we need to become human.

The question of whether life has meaning, of whether our individual lives make any real difference, is a religious question not because it is about matters of belief or attend- ance at worship services but because it is about ultimate values and ultimate concerns. It is religious because it is about what is left to deal with when you have learned everything there is to learn and solved all the problems that can be solved. Religion focuses on the difference be- tween human beings and all other species, and on the search for a goal so significant that we make our lives significa~t by attaching ourselves to it.

Amenca's Declaration of Independence guarantees every one of us thc right to the pursuit of happiness. But because the Declaration is a political document and not a religious one it do 1 . ' . es not warn us of the frustrations of :;;~:~exercise that right, because the pursuit of happi- ing happ~n:~ni You don't become happy by pursu-

. ecome happy by living a life that 22

Was Th,re Something I Wai Supposed to Do with My Lift?

means something. The happiest people you know are obably not the richest or most famous , probably not the

~~cs who work hardest at being happy by reading the articles and buying the books and latching on to the latest fads. 1 suspect that the happiest people you know are the ones who work at being kind, helpful, and reliable, and happiness sneaks into their lives while they arc ~usy doin_g those things. You don't become happy by pursuing happi- ness. It is always a by-product, never a primary goal. Happiness is a butterfly-the more you chase it, the more it flies away from you and hides. But stop chasing it, put away your net and busy yourself with other, more produc- tive things than the pursuit of personal happiness, and it will sneak up on you from behind and perch on your shoulder.

To cite Jung a second time: "We overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many aspects of life which should have been experienced lie in the lum- bcrroom of dusty memories." I looked at that sentence when I had read it and had the feeling of confronting a truth I had always known and had worked hard at not admitting to myself. Only now, in my late forties, was I prepared to face it. Like so many people, I had become very good at certain aspects of my work, but at the cost of distorting my personality. My family, my own sense of wholeness had paid the price, but society at large was so appreciative of th~ imbalance that I managed not to notice what I was doing . Their applause, their words of praise and appreciation drowned out the still, small voice inside of me which told me that I was leaving something out.

I remembered the countless evenings I let myself be

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persuaded that sitting in on a committee meeting (for the third evening that week) was more important than being home with my family and that the committee could not possibly function without me. (Only years later did a cler- gyman friend tell me, "God may use you but He doesn't need you.") I thought of the times I would schedule a counseling appointment at an hour that was convenient for the caller but that meant my going without dinner, Some years ago, I was invited to address the graduating class of a rabbinic seminary. I told those young people about to embark on careers in the rabbinate, "There will be Friday evenings when you will rush your family through dinner so that you can get to services on time to give a sermon about the Sabbath as uninterrupted family time. There will be days when you will leave a sick child at home or a child studying for a test, while you go to teach religious values to the Temple youth group, There will be Sundays when you will cancel plans for a family picnic to officiate at a funeral, where you will praise the deceased as a man who never let his business interfere with his obligations to his family , And worst of all, you won't even realize what you are doing as you do it,"

I remember reading an interview with one of the most successful auto dealers in America, in which he shared the secret of his success: "I treat everybody who walks into my showroom as if he was my best friend , I find out what he's interested in, what he docs for a living, and whatever it is, I pretend I'm interested in that and ask him to tell me about it. By the time I'm done, all he wants to do is buy a car from me." I thought to myself, How sad to have to earn your living like that, by pretending to like everyone until you forget what it really feels like genuinely to enjoy someone's company as a friend, not just as a potential

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Wa, Thm Som,thlng I Wa, Suppcs,d to Do with My Li/ti

customer. Contrived emotion (What am I supposed to feel now?) replaces genuine emotion (How do I really feel about this person?) until the ability to know what you arc really feeling disappears. Perhaps this is why there is so much phony conviviality and so little genuine friendship in the Jives of American men today.

And worst of all, society applauds this imbalance, hon- oring us for our financial success, praising us for our sclf- sacrificc. ''The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost ofa diminution of personality." Forces in society won't let us become whole people because we arc more useful to them when one small part of us is over- developed, Like hunting dogs who have been trained to bring back the game birds in their mouths without taking a bite out of them, we have become useful to society by denying our own healthy instincts.

This book is not about how to be happy or how to be popular. There arc a lot of other books to do that. It is about how to be successful, but not in the way most people use that word. What it is really about is how to be human, how to live with the feeling that you arc more than a moth that lives for a moment and then disappears. It is about how to know that you have lived as a human being was meant to live, that you have not wasted your life. It is a book about giving your life meaning, feeling that you have used your time on earth well and not wasted it, and that the world will be different for your having passed through it. It is a book written by a man arrived at middle age, telling you some of the things I know now that I wish I had known when I was younger,

My previous book When Bad Things Happen to Good People was written to help people cope with the kind of

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

shattering tragedy that divides a person's life in two, be- fore and after that terrible moment. A tragedy like that- the death of someone you love, a crippling accident, or diagnosis of an untreatable illnes~oncentrates the mind. You cannot help dealing with it, trying to figure out how your life will be different because of it. This book is written to help people cope with another, more subtle kind of tragedy: the disease of boredom, meaninglessness, a sense of the futility and purposelessness of our lives, In some ways, it is a more dangerous problem because we do not always realize that it is happening to us. It has a way of sneaking up on us, draining the joy and zest out of our lives until, when we realize what is happening, it is too late for us to do anything about it. This book tries to help us deal with the fear that we will live and one day we will die, and neither our living nor our dying will make a difference to the world.

I started to write a very different book, a rather de- tached book about other people's problems, full of advice about how to solve them. I wrote for a while and realized that something was missing, I came to realize that I would have to write this book out of my own problems and confusion, not other people's. I would have to make this a very personal book, as my previous book was, writing not about man's search for meaning in the abstract but about my own search, with all of its mistakes and frustra- tions.

Three things have happened to me in the last five years which have reshaped the way I look at my life, First, I wrote a book about our fourteen-year-old son's death from an incurable illness, and how I found the resources to accept and survive it. I wrote it out of my own need to tell the story, with no expectation that anyone outside of a

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War There Som t th(ng I WOJ Supposed to Do with My Life?

mall circle of friends would ever read it. To my amazc- ~cnt (and to the amazement of the two publishers who saw it firs t and turned it down), it became an international best-seller. Y cars later, I still get letters of appreciation from people who were helped and comforted by it. The book's success brought me some measure of fame and fortune, kept me impossibly busy for several years, put a strain on my health, my family, and my non-book-related activities. But what it did more than anything else was force me to sort out the desirable from the less desirable in all of that glitter. Time and again I had to ask myself, "ls this what I really want out of life?" Sometimes the answer was an emphatic yes, sometimes a reluctant no. But in either event, I had to face the question with a frequency and urgency I had never known before. I had to decide how I wanted to spend the limited time and energy I had, and what I really wanted to be remem- bered for. The mistakes I made and the lessons I learned trying to answer those questions arc the foundation of this book.

The second thing that happened to me was that my father died just short of his eighty-fourth birthday, forcing me to confront the issue of mortality, his and mine. I had to acknowledge that even the longest and most successful of lives would one day end. I had never known a day of my life without my father there, and now I had to sum up the whole story of his life and sec what was left. My father had been a very active, successful man for many years, and now I would see which of all his achievements died and disappeared with him , and which ones remained to give him a measure of immortality, My father's death meant that I was now the oldest genera tion, the next in line as

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WHEN ALL YOU'VE EVER WANTED ISN'T ENOUGH

it were, and it was time to start thinking about what aspects of my own life would outlast me and keep my name and memory alive.

And finally, while I was at work on this book, I turned fifty years old. When I was young, I never dreaded passing my thirtieth or fortieth birthday and no longer being young, as many people do. After all, I come out of a Jewish tradition which reveres wisdom and maturity more than it does the freshness and vigor of youth. I figured forty was a good age for someone who was giving sermons about how to live. But fifty seemed awfully old, distress- ingly closer to the end of life than to its beginning. Noth- ing I had ever read prepared me for the surprise of turning fifty . It was so easy. I find myself much more settled, with a much better sense of who I am, than I was at previous milestones. At thirty and even at forty, I had questions about what my life would turn out to be about. At thirty, my wife and I were still in the process of planning our family and having children. I had not yet left the appren- tice stage of my career, still serving as assistant rabbi of a large suburban congregation. At thirty-five, I was ambi- tious and restless, torn between the conflicting claims of my job and my family . At forty, I was struggling against accepting the fact that some of my personal and profes- sional dreams would never come true. I was kicking against life's unfairness, unwilling to accept it. But now I am fifty . Most of the major questions of my life have been answered, some to my satisfaction and some less so. I am confident that there are still surprises ahead of me. I hope I have not stopped growing, But the storms and uncertain- ties that raged within me when I was younger seem to have calmed.

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Wa s Thtrt Somtth ing I Was Supposed to Do with My Life?

The need for meaning is not a biological need like the eed for food and air. Neither is it a psychological need,

~kc the need for acceptance and self-esteem. It is a reli- gious need, an ultimate thirst of our souls. And so it is to religion that we must now turn to look for answers.

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