Warming Both Hands

A good friend told me shortly before he died, when he was in his late nineties, that all struggles are ultimately pointless, that life has no higher purpose, that we’re left with nothing at the end. Do you mean, I asked him, that your long life of professional accomplishment, the people you’ve helped, the students you’ve mentored, the colleagues you’ve encouraged matter not at all? Not at all, he said.

It’s true that in an unimaginably long time our sun will have burned itself out and Earth will become a dead planet, and then Shakespeare will be honored no more than a common laborer. So from that point of view life is indeed pointless, especially if you’re an atheist, as was my nonagenarian friend. Believers can derive comfort from their efforts to fulfill God’s plan or God’s commandments or from their hopes of a heavenly afterlife. But if you don’t share those hopes, if you don’t believe in a divine plan or commandments, what’s left?

Atheists, it seems to me, must create their own meaning, their own purpose. For me the purpose of life is to live it as fully as possible. By this I mean being aware of the moment. When washing dishes, for example, I try not to rush through it in order to get to another task. Rather, as I’ve written before, I try to pay attention to the warmth of the water on my hand, the sound of water splashing on the dishes, the sight of the multicolored soap bubbles. The moment, really, is all there is.

Sure, I’ve had some exotic experiences: traveling in a third-class compartment from Beijing to Moscow on the Trans Siberian Railway, sleeping in Ethiopian mission stations, watching, from the deck of a freighter, the sun rise over the Pacific, lecturing in Hebrew with a vocabulary of 2,000 words. These experiences were indeed intense, but you don’t have to go around the world to find intense experience. You can find them in your own back yard. The scent of fresh apples at our neighborhood’s weekly Green Market has given me as intense a sensation as any I’ve ever had.

No, I’m not a hedonist, finding the highest good in sensual pleasure, although I value pleasure as much as anyone. Mindfulness of the moment, though, can help us appreciate that pleasure, and it is paying attention to the here and now, to our actions, especially with respect to others, that can help us realize life fully in all its glory, pain, and complexity. This seems to me to be purpose enough in life, with the important proviso that it can be accomplished without harm to others.

I reached this conclusion relatively late in life, having rushed through much of it heedlessly, it now seems to me, without appreciating the wonder and glory of being alive. I’m trying to make up for that now, doing my best to squeeze as much experience as I can from the time that’s left. I hope I‘ll be able to hold on to that view if my physical abilities and my opportunities for new experience become, like my late nonagenarian friend’s, radically diminished, even though that too would be a new experience.

I hope that what Walter Savage Landor wrote about himself as an old man will also be true of me: I warmed both hands before the fire of life. As for the next and concluding line to his poem, It sinks and I am ready to depart, I’m not so sure.