Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (5 page)

In other situations, because membership itself changes, because the needs of the time change, too, as the years go by, the expectations of the members change, as well. Then it’s not too long before the officeholders themselves begin to feel distance grow up between them and the very people who once cheered them there. Sometimes it’s as simple as seeing the work of a lamplighter consumed by the new electric switch, of seeing the artistry of my life, the talent for which I have been acclaimed, replaced by the new technology.

Even celebrities know the pressure of having public tastes change toward them, however talented they may be.

In every instance, support flags, energy fades, endurance pales.

Whatever the particular situation that prompts a major life change for those who have known the exhilaration of public approval, however limited and local, or the abrupt loss of the public spotlight, as well, the moment is a major one, can even be traumatic for some. Of all the things in a person’s life that require a person to literally begin again, this may be the most impacting. This one is not simply a time of progressive change from one level of involvement to another in the same area. This one involves a real reappraisal of the self. And often a sense of loss, of no place to go, of having life stopped in midflight.

And so, in the light of such fragility, how do people
whose lives depend on this kind of public function sleep through the night with time nipping at their heels, bringing them closer by the day to the end they know must come but do not want? What is the answer then to the question, Where do I go now? What do I do now? What is my life about now?

The fact is that the preparation for a change of status, any status, must begin even before the change occurs. Years before life becomes consumed by the public and its public functions, the healthy person decides never to be held captive to the masks of officialdom. Never to become the role in which they find themselves. Never to surrender a private life to a public one.

It is a matter of making sure that a single dimension of life does not consume all the other ones—family, friends, personal interests and basic and fundamental human goals. It is, as young people argue, a matter of “getting a life” that is not consumed by a role, by a position, by a function that will just as easily become someone else’s position tomorrow as my own today.

Few American presidents managed to stay as close to people and real life as Harry Truman did. Every day he simply got up and walked around the block, meeting new friends, greeting old ones, becoming part of the environment. As a result, when his term of office was over, there was no neighborhood to go back to because he had never left it.

Keeping up with old hobbies or developing new ones protects us from becoming one-dimensional people in one-dimensional positions.

Creating other equally avid interests—like research or academics or philanthropy as Condoleezza Rice or Jeb Bush or Jimmy Carter did—provides another world equally important, equally impacting to go to when the first one ends. More important, it gives us an even broader definition of ourselves than any single position can ever provide.

Then life becomes an ongoing drama made up of many chapters, not a one-act play that leaves us all dressed up with no place to go when that act ends. Then life is rich and full and exciting and real all the way to the grave.

It is easy in a world of plastic celebrities, people whose lives are made on Madison Avenue by photographers and advertising moguls, to confuse the nature of a position with what it means to be a person. In this country, we are all defined by what we do—Kelly Somebody, high school English teacher—rather than by what we are: kind, just, honest, hardworking. What we
are
is reserved for our obituary, what we
do
determines the way we’re identified now. Such a pity. It means that one part of us has consumed the rest of us—to the point where, far too often, we ourselves confuse the two and lose sight of the dimensions of our lives that really count.

Dag Hammarskjöld, past secretary-general of the United Nations, writes of our real purpose as real people, a criterion that goes beyond anybody’s role description. He says, “You have not done enough, you have never done enough, so long as it is still possible that you have something to contribute.”

It’s those qualities that in the end define us and that never end with the term.

In a capitalist society consumption is a national virtue. It is its backbone, its engine, the mainframe at the very center of the society. We measure our society’s well-being by keeping precise records of the amount of consumption we do. We use percentages to signal how much better or worse we were at buying things this year than we were last. We celebrate our gross national product when we never even consider calculating our gross national distribution of goods, and we define buying as a sign of national health. It’s buying, after all, that sustains the economy. And sustaining the economy is what a capitalist system is all about. “The chief business of the American people,” President Calvin Coolidge said, “is business.”

At the height of the worst national tragedy in U.S. history, the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001, President Bush ended his first television message to the American public
by telling them that the most important thing they could do in the face of such a devastating attack was to “keep our economy going … to go shopping more.” The whole world must have drawn breath on that one.

In the face of the first foreign attack on U.S. soil since the War of 1812, in the middle of the smoking rubble that carried the ashes of over three thousand civilians, there was something about the message that rang hollow, that broke the heart, that lacked soul. No talk of discovering reasons for such an attack. No talk of reaching out to allies in the Middle East. No talk of bringing the height of U.S. justice to this devastating situation. No talk about being our spiritual best at such a time as this. No, the god who would save us from this disaster, Bush was clear, was the god of the free market.

And yet, why wouldn’t we be a society of consumers? What other basic value do we learn in a world where developing excess want is more important than meeting basic needs? In societies such as these the people who manage to accumulate the most things are considered the most successful. So we sell and we buy and we buy and we sell, all of us trying to catch up and keep up and get more tomorrow than we had yesterday. We live in a whirlwind of exchange where we market to three-year-olds on the television sets in their playrooms and begrudge retirement monies to those who spent their whole lives making the very things we want everybody else to buy.

The problem, of course, is that the never-ending marathon of marketing that is required to maintain such a system is now sucking the rest of the world into it, as well.
Poor societies, which cannot afford the goods we buy, make the goods wealthy societies consume at lesser pay and great cost to the quality of their own lives.

At the same time, the quality of our own lives, drowned in adult toys and public playthings, are just as surely being smothered by them, too.

Judging from the front page of every newspaper we print, every television program we watch, every deteriorating school and bombed-out neighborhood and pitted road and overloaded electrical grid and homeless family in the nation—in a nation awash in the flotsam and jetsam of things—there’s something missing that is far more important than the gadgets we have chosen in its stead. We are bartering our souls for the sake of what will be tomorrow’s refuse.

In every great spiritual tradition, in most modern measures of psychological health, the tendency to excessive consumption is seen as a sign of deep personal need, the kind no amount of artifacts can supply. Then, it isn’t what we have that marks us; it’s what we don’t have and are trying to substitute for them that signals danger.

It’s a sense of great cloying want that dogs us through our days and haunts our nights which, in the end, corrupts our hearts and sours whatever joy today’s accumulation masks. We get addicted to things as surely as some people get addicted to alcohol or drugs. They are our signs to ourselves that we are really worth something. And yet, ironically, it is precisely what we lack that they signal most.

Sometimes it’s status we’re looking for in buying the bigger house, the extra cars, the larger piece of property. Things that will put us into debt and under pressure for
years while we look for social approval or public respect. And all the while, if truth were told, it’s the people who scrubbed every table and took down the booths after every civic holiday that people remember. It’s only righteousness and character that bring a person lasting honor.

Often it’s love we’re looking for, only to discover that things can buy us sycophants but never affection or concern. Those things come from being lovable, not from being ostentatious.

Commonly, we invest in things as trappings, as signals, as badges of success when we lack the confidence to believe in our self. As Anna Quindlen says of it, “There was a period when I believed stuff meant something. I thought that if you had matching side chairs and a sofa that harmonized and some beautiful lamps to light them you would have a home, that elegance signaled happiness.”

The price we pay for the accumulation of things is a high one. For the rest of our lives we are condemned to fear the loss of them and to live forever with the taste of continual insecurity in our mouths, unending neediness in our hearts and the inability of soul to enjoy what we have and be grateful for what we love.

The things of the soul—the joy of life, the love of beauty, the gift of friendship, the integration into nature, the pursuit of truth and the depth of the spirit—grow in open land, bare of the baubles of life, free of frenzy and devoid of the chaos of accumulation. Then we are rich. Then we are strong. Then no one can take anything away from us because we have already relinquished it. Or, as the philosopher Epictetus wrote: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”

There are two kinds of people in the world, we’re fond of saying on St. Patrick’s Day. And it’s true. The only problem is that we confuse the categories.

The first kind is the politician who was asked in the course of a recent election, as a matter of economic comparison, how many houses he owned. The candidate struggled for an answer. “Well, I’m not sure right now,” he said slowly, trying hard to remember, “six or seven, I guess.”

The second kind is the homeless street beggar who found a diamond and platinum engagement ring in his begging bowl and, instead of pawning it, put it aside for safekeeping until the stranger who had dropped it there by accident returned three days later to look for it.

Both types of people are poor. But only one of them knows it. And that in itself is another kind of poverty.

The poverty of plenty is a state of mind where enough
is never enough. It is an agonizing situation to be in, this spider’s web of unending desire. The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm said of it, “Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction.”

Greed, in other words, is the engorgement of the soul, a spiritual obesity that consumes one bite of life after another without ever bothering to really taste the prize. For these people, life is not about enjoying things, it is simply about having them. It is about collecting the trophies of life, like hunters who hang moose racks in their living rooms long after the hunt is over.

In a life like this, everything grows redundant, nothing more than an upgrade of last year’s model. Extra cars sit in the garage undriven. The houses are never lived in. The expensive watches are in a display case. And the poverty of soul, like a cancer cell, begins to eat away at the rest of life.

The even more interesting dimension of the dilemma is that the syndrome does not simply attach itself to wealth. Very economically average people who allow things to define them can be just as drugged by the desire to possess, rather than driven by the need to become even more of a human being than they already are. The point is that we can all become glutted by the pursuit of things rather than the pursuit of life.

To be satiated, glutted, is to lose the sense of taste for life. There is no enjoyment anymore. The definition of life becomes “Been there, done that.” So what is left to hope for, or what remains to be seen, and which of life’s mountains is yet to be climbed?

Hoarding becomes the taste that poisons every other taste in life until finally we pile up so many things we no longer remember or really feel the thrill of having them. With the sense of newness goes the grace of appreciation, one of the more important dimensions of life. The ability to appreciate the delights of life and the gifts of people and the thrill of unfamiliar events, rather than simply taking them for granted, is what gives tomorrow special meaning. One brand-new fishing pole is a luxury; seventy-two of them is nothing more than a muddle of fishing rods. As Dryden said, “Plenty makes us poor.” Bereft of the power of the singular experiences of life, like children with too many toys, we don’t know which one to play with next. So we simply sit and look at them. And for what purpose?

Appreciation is the grace of sensibility, of really experiencing every moment for its uniqueness and its awe. It is what enables a person to stand on a street corner, arms out wide, head up, smiling the smile of the holy and giving thanks for the depth of every moment of it. It is the posture of the heart that says life is good, I am blessed, the universe is friendly, the world is beautiful. As Julian of Norwich said, “In this acorn is everything that is.” The one who has learned to appreciate says, “In this moment is the essence of everything glorious I have been given in life—and it is enough.”