Who am I? Why am I here? These are questions so old, so rehearsed by individuals, by entire cultures, that they’ve drifted off into the foggy realms of cliche and comedy. But they’ve lost none of their sharp seriousness for anyone asking them, in earnest, today. In some form or other, they bubble up to us when we’re in crisis. We may hear them in quieter moments, when we forget ourselves and our material pursuits just long enough to listen. They’re asking us, in fact, about love, about compassion. How so? Because our most profound and genuine feelings for those closest to us are, for all their value to us, only one form of love. Another form of love is to see clearly who we are and ‘where’ we might be (in a spiritual as well as psychological sense); and then to choose, freely, to place ourselves there.
When we are most ourselves – our truest selves – then we can be of greatest service to others. The alternative is a kind of slavery and, as Virginia Woolf reminds us, “Hitlers are bred by slaves.” Many of those who seem inherently selfish have, at some level, been complicit in a process towards selfishness. We all make choices in that respect, however unhelpful our upbringing or social environment. But we tend not to see those choices in terms of ‘love’ because our culture is so busy confusing love with desire, with tribalism. Partly because of that, we learn to assess our most important acts of love, often mistakenly, in terms of the most intense emotions we ourselves feel.
It might help to see this in terms of a jigsaw? We each of us have our single piece of the pattern to contribute. The ills of a person – indeed, of a society – usually arise when those pieces aspire to the ‘norms’ of success, following the lead of advertisers and popular role models, rather than their deepest instincts for rightness. Too many of us want to be the same (famous or rich) piece of jigsaw (a piece that, perhaps, shouldn’t even be in the box), while many of the humbler (possibly crucial) sections are ignored, exploited or undervalued.
So, there’s no sky because no one wants to be a plain piece of blue; there’s no backdrop, because everyone’s clamouring to be the central figure in the design. What might have been gorgeous cloud is vaguely uncomfortable down among the leaves; what could have been a juicy leaf mulched in the ground feels thinly dry and abandoned in the wind. Instead of being an accomplished article of beauty, the picture becomes warped and confused. Those who went before us haven’t always helped. They too often chose, as we so often choose now, political and business systems whose primary purpose is the maintenance of economic over human progress. Today, it’s pandemic for society to clip the corners off young individuals in order to fit them into desired/desirable roles; and we mostly go along with it. Meanwhile, our political and business structures make it all but impossible for people of profound compassion and humility to occupy, unsacked or unassassinated, any conventional position of power.
Of course, my jigsaw analogy has its limitations and problems; but my main point stands. Few people uncover in themselves that form of love that drives them to explore who they really are, or the compassion to put themselves where that leads them. Please don’t mistake my jigsaw for fatalism, destiny, conformity, self-sacrifice, patriotism, Big Brother. This jigsaw isn’t a mechanism. Those pieces of sky aren’t identical – not at all. Indeed, this jigsaw is, more accurately, a view through a window frame onto a living, shifting landscape. ‘Finding your place’ in that landscape isn’t about self-obsession, neither does it mean dissolving the self. It takes courage and sensitivity – as well as time – to seek out your nature and to work with it to achieve the truth of what you may be. It’s much easier, so much less loving, to simply fall in with the herd. I suppose, in the end, one must decide to believe that there is a glow at our centre, however clouded it may have become. I’ve yet to meet a newborn child who lacks it. We can try our best to open ourselves to an experience of that glow, in ourselves and in others.
In a globalised world much bewitched by advertiser and financier, it’s understandable to sometimes feel that our private choices are irrelevant or, at best, of merely personal significance. It’s a short walk from that feeling to arrive at resignation, apathy. And so, we focus our attention on those we love, on some small, tangible outcome. All well and good. But there are purposes beyond that, not anything that can be scientifically verified or demonstrated on profit-loss sheets. These are the purposes we feel in our bones, however briefly, in moments of insight and self-candour; purposes that implicate us profoundly and completely. Not the manifestos of any government, or the plans of any business; nor the demands of the selfish gene. Our governments, as they stand, are unable to serve these greater purposes. I doubt if they really register them in any meaningful way. Nikita Khrushchev once said (I quote loosely): “Politicians are the same everywhere. They promise to build a bridge even where there is no river.”
But we are not impotent. We needn’t become accidents of society, or robots of biology, or victims of our times. We gain irresistible power, and also serve the whole, when we discover our own deepest purpose and are true to it. Nothing prevents any of us from being a nucleus for resistance, possibility, hope. Any culture, any form of politics, as much as any person, is dead not only when its heart or its reason ceases to function, but when it considers those most ancient of questions – Who am I? Why am I herei – to be obsolete nonsense or, worst of all, naive.
