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The meanings of life
Four noble truths of connectedness.
When I was 15, a church sermon left its mark on me. The priest began with the question, “Where should we seek God?” Years later, I found my own answer. I believe what for centuries has been called “finding God” means finding meaning in our lives. A new perspective has emerged from neuroscience in the past 20 years. What gives life its richness does not come from reason and intellect. It comes instead from a well-balanced emotional brain, that deepest and most archaic part of the nervous system. And what does a balanced emotional brain need? Above all, strong connections, full relationships. These can be found in four areas of our lives.
Our physical existence: If we don’t allow ourselves to taste, smell, touch, listen and look while concentrating on the present moment, we are not connected to our bodies. Yoga, an ancient source of wisdom, is first and foremost an education in connecting to our physical beings. Exercise, too—which engages our attention, our agility, our strength and builds endurance in our cells—is another means of connecting. As we grow aware of our bodies’ reactions to the world, we are connected to the roots of our emotions.
- Intimacy: The emotional brain is connected to the body, but it is also designed to regulate our emotional relationships. Naturally, love is an effective way of giving us meaning. When we look each other in the eyes and feel our hearts beating faster, we stop asking existential questions. All that involves us in intimate relationships anchors us firmly in our existence. We don’t question the meaning of life when we take a child by the hand on his first day at school, or when we watch our daughter singing in a choir. All those to whom we feel close connect us to life and give it meaning.
- The community: I had a 30-year-old patient whose life expectancy was limited to a few months by cancer. He was no longer working as an electrician and spent his time moping in front of the television, in anguish at his approaching death. I saw him once a week and we talked about his fear and what his life had been like. He ended up volunteering his time to repair the air-conditioning system in his local church. He spent several hours at the church almost every day. People greeted him by name when they met him in the corridors. When he was working on the roof, they waved to him, and brought him food and drink. In a few weeks, even though his health was getting worse, his anxiety abated. All it took, in the end, was to feel useful and appreciated.
- Spirituality: It is possible to feel connected to a dimension beyond the body. For some, the greatest source of meaning is the sense of being in the presence of something much greater. We often feel this simply when we are face to face with nature, or in certain places that remind us how insignificant we are in the universe. Strangely, it is at the precise moments when we experience how small we are that life itself seems to fill with meaning—and so do we.
David Servan-Schreiber is a psychiatry professor in France and the U.S., and author of Healing without Freud or Prozac.
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By, Karen Louise Boothe i a writer and international communications, media and civic engagement consultant based in Minneapolis. You can reach her via, www.preponeconsulting.com
“Meditation is to be aware of every thought and of every feeling, never to say it is right or wrong, but to just watch it and move with it.” –Krishnamurti In the small western Africa country of Sierra Leone the usual greeting—spoken in Krio, the Creole-based language— is “How de body?” Often the reply is “we de fol don an git up,” (we fall down and then get up). It was with this same resilience the country’s citizens, lucky enough to survive, endured a brutal civil war between 1991 and 2001.
This same resilience and perseverance shown by the people of Sierra Leone is what led to peaceful and successful national elections last fall. The voter turn-out rate of nearly 70 percent rose out of harsh conditions that most voters in the U.S. would consider as insurmountable odds against voting including a 35 percent literacy rate, 70 percent unemployment rate, life expectancy of only 40 years, heavy rains, lack of transportation and walking distances—in many cases—exceeding 5 miles. Even so, Thousands of citizens waited in long lines to vote, demonstrating their personal commitment to peaceful elections. In Freetown and the provinces voters lined up as early as 3:00 a.m.to cast their ballots when the polls opened at 7:00 a.m. The general election conducted August 11, 2007 and subsequent run-off election conducted a few weeks later were the culminating events to my 4 months of work serving as a long term elections observer there.
Election observers are instructed, by an internationally agreed upon code-of-conduct, to remain neutral in their work and neutrality is perceived as achievable only by creating distance and separation. To observe is to see. But can one really “see” across such divides? As a veteran journalist the privileged role of perching oneself on the periphery, is a familiar—albeit uncomfortable—one. By acting as an observer—or the seer— one distances oneself, if you will, from other people, their identities and their experiences. It runs in direct opposition to the thought that knowledge is the annihilation of the separation between oneself and another—Swami Prajnanpad.
In fact, I have often wondered to myself if rendering one invisible—as many privileged, western, white travelers do when they seek out so-called, culturally exotic experiences— is to brush away that person and, in doing so, committing an act of violence against that person.
The most telling example of this was the nightly drive to the hotel from the office in Freetown. Invariably, we’d get stuck in heavily congested traffic making what should have been a 20 minute drive an hour-and-half journey during the city’s infamously congested drive time. All along the route people would approach stopped and slow moving vehicles selling everything from phone cards to sponges to radios to chewing gum and cigarettes. Dozens more would knock on vehicle windows with their amputated limbs—the results of war torture— begging for money. Sensing my internal struggle over wanting to reach out and give away a few coins and knowing the little difference it would make to anyone’s life, Mohammad, the driver, barked, “don’t roll the window down! Don’t even look! We’ll be surrounded and stuck in a mob. I won’t be able to help.” I sensed his own panic over the prospect and respected his command.
That’s when I remembered something my friend Laurie had once told me. She had instructed me on what she said was a Buddhist practice of healing. I lean toward being more pragmatic than spiritual but her advice popped into my head, I am quite sure, out of my own need to wrestle with such an internal struggle. I didn’t remember the exact details so I’d acknowledge the person’s existence, without looking at him or her directly, while breathing in. Upon my exhale I’d send that person a blessing. I made this my daily practice during my 4 months in Sierra Leone while encountering so many people along the journey that I didn’t have the courage to lock eyes with or acknowledge directly.
And then, one day, the unexpected happened. A small girl, about 4 years old, exercised the most loving gesture anyone has ever made toward me. While Sasha, my observation partner in the eastern Kono District, and I were standing in sweltering heat and sun in a small village up-country a tiny ebony figure of no more than three feet tall meandered toward us along the dusty, pebbled main street. She walked right up to me and, looking into my eyes, reached up toward me. I kneeled down and took her hand into mine. Together, we turned to Sasha and he snapped a picture. Then as quietly as she approached she dropped her hand from mine, turned and slowly walked away back down the street toward her mud and thatched-roof home.
The wordless exchange taught me a lifelong lesson and imbued in me a deeper knowledge about human connection. In this small child’s very simple act of truly seeing me I became blessed.
posted by prepone on 1/ 9/2008 12:23 pm