◊ Listening to Boredom (continued)
Life is significant because it is LIFE, because without it nothing would be, because we didn’t do anything to obtain or deserve it, and because we can serve it by being witnesses and bearers of it. We do this by living fully, that is, gratefully, mindfully, reverently, joyfully, responsibly, and compassionately. ~ djm
[The Fear of An Insignificant Life cont.]
In her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, Doctor Rachel Naomi Remen, Co-Founder and Medical Director of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, tells of a successful businessman who came to see her one and half years after he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. She recounts that before the cancer, this man’s view of life was that happiness meant “having the cookie.” His attitude toward life rose and fell according to whether he had the cookie. “Unfortunately,” Remen writes, “the cookie kept changing. Some of the time it was money, sometimes power, sometimes sex. At other times, it was the new car, the biggest contract, the most prestigious address.” He confides in her, “It’s like I stopped learning how to live after I was a kid. When I give my son a cookie, he is happy. If I take the cookie away or it breaks, he is unhappy. But he is two and a half and I am forty-three. It’s taken me this long to understand that the cookie will never make me happy for long.”
With new found insight and self-awareness he explains the trap of the cookie. “The minute you have the cookie it starts to crumble or you start to worry about it crumbling or about someone trying to take it away from you. You know, you have to give up a lot of things to take care of the cookie, to keep it from crumbling and be sure that no one takes it away from you. You may not even get a chance to eat it because you are so busy just trying not to lose it.” Then, he tells her the gift that cancer has brought him, the realization that “Happiness does not have anything to do with the cookie, it has to do with being alive.” Lastly, articulating the “aha” that suddenly came to him, he adds: “Damn, I guess life is the cookie.”
Five centuries earlier, confronted with his own physical adversity, St. Ignatius of Loyola, after being forced to bed-rest in order to recuperate from a severe battle wound, came face to face with his own life-changing realization when through the use of his imagination and a listening heart he began to discern the relatively insignificant rewards of soldering and romantic chivalry compared to the genuine consolation and joy he felt when he considered the altruistic adventure of following Christ.
The cookie-seeking cancer patient and St. Ignatius both discovered that the unlived life is not the life lacking in adventure but rather the life given to the wrong adventure. Not the wrong adventure generally, as if there were only one way to live a significant life. But rather, the wrong adventure for me or for me now. Boredom is not the result of having nothing to do but a call to do what matters. If the spiritual root of boredom is the unlived life, the failure to live lives commensurate with the sheer gift that is our being and the consequent responsibility that comes with it, then listening to the boredom has the potential to create within us the desire to live lives of significance, lives that signify something or Someone, lives that are signs of a mystery and meaning that transcend the self, making us each a sacrament of what actually and ultimately enlivens, and participants in whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing, commendable, and worthy of praise. In her poem “I Will Not Die an Unlived Life,” Dawna Markova expresses acting on this desire:
I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.
Listening deeply so that we can live out the unique significance of our lives is a sign of God’s life in us. The surest antidote for boredom is cultivating a sense of significant being. It is also the noblest gesture of gratitude to the Giver of Life, to the Life of life. Cultivate is an action verb, an earthy, agrarian, calloused-hand-and-dirt-under-the-nails verb. We don’t wait for significance to drop out of the sky into our lap and happen. It’s happening all the time all around us. Instead, we call forth what is already in the soil like a giddy seed, nurture and care for it, help it to grow and thrive by working the land of our lives that holds it.
We participate in the significance of life by consciously living as sacraments of the life in which we each live and move and have our being. We live as sacraments of life whenever we blossom and whenever we choose to give our life away as fruit.
PRACTICE & REFLECTION:
Today’s mantra: “Life IS the cookie.”
Today’s question: “What do I want my life to SIGNify?”