What Do You Mean?

“What do you need in order to find a place in society? Maybe you need to be a good garage mechanic. Maybe you need to be a good commercial person. To be a human being, you have to find your gifts, and see your gifts developed. Then you have to make a choice: Do I just want to be the best? Or do I want to be a good human being, and find the real meaning of my life, and the meaning of every person's life?"

Jean Vanier

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Dear Alex,

The search for a place in society - land or lot, room or spot of ours - can leave us out of place. You know you have found the best place when you have been displaced.

Yesterday I met an octagenarian who had lived in high places: veteran of class and honor, father among great grandchildren, hunter in the wilderness. Rugged and conquered, his places were the mise en scène of the American Old West genre.

I got lost in the trenches of his face beaten by sun and war. His eyes were wells in desert, brimming with feigned apathy. At the crest of downfall, he floated between shame and shock.

He spoke a few words to me, his voice box out of sync from a recent stroke. He floundered to find his bearing, his stance replaced by wheelchair, back and bottom misplaced in the vigor of Spring.

I asked him: Any plans for the summer? What do you love to do now?

A prolonged silence cleansed the room and made it spotless, invisible to the trauma of present living.

I think this is what Vanier is telling us. I am using present tense because his spirit moves among us. I have never known him through reading, reflecting and living out his words before his death earlier this week. So out of place, so early in a day, a giant passes. An empty place, an aura of grace is ours now to re-tradition.

Last night I watched the 3-hr blockbuster, brain/body-busting "Avengers: Endgame” in 3D. Giants pounced and bolted out of and into perfect places to be spotted and spotless at pristine times. The theatre became the bowels of giant expectations and seats turbo-charged to warm the derrières of giant seekers.

When it all ended, I exited through the doors, feeling lesser of a human, the smallness of spirit among the god of small things.  Curtains drop, scales fall, lights on.

Homeless, nameless, restless, we shall keep feeling out of place to find our place in this universe.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

Why is it not ok to be "simply the best"?  Isn't it good enough to want to be better than anyone else at the job I am doing?

Maybe it's because we are looking at a human-made standard that is really rather arbitrary.  For example, if I am having a hot dog stand and selling the most hot dog, then I can legitimately claim myself to be "the best."

Vanier believes differently.  He believes it is not about being "the best," but being a "good human being" and finding the real meaning of not only my own life, and also that of every person's life.

Now that is abstract.  That is too overreaching.  Too high a call for a person selling hot dog.

But how about for a person who is not selling hot dog?  Would Vanier's vision be any less abstract or overreaching, say, for a banker?  Is it any more or less feasible for a doctor to strive to be a "good human being" who seeks out individual and collective meaning?

The truth is, the more presumably "meaningful" the work, the harder it is for a worker to question its presumed meaning.

It is a deep irony.

If meaning can be given or presumed or preordained, then no one needs to "find" it.  And if it is meant to be found, then why can it not be found in presumably unmeaningful work?  To seek out something is to be surprised.  To finally arrive at what we did not expect to discover might well be a good definition of "finding meaning."

If something is meant to mean the same thing to you and to me, then both of us are just taking in prescription, a given standard that is predetermined, often rather arbitrarily.  Could this be why we often find our work, even life itself, meaningless?  Could this be also why if we are to lose the work by which meaning is prescribed to us, that we would lose ourselves too?

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes claims "Everything Is Meaningless," but the Hebrew word for "meaningless" here is hevel, which actually means smoke or vapor, a metaphor to suggest life is not exactly without meaning, but mysterious, often baffling, and certainly beyond our control.

It is in accepting and learning to live with such precarious nature of life that one grows to find meaning in the most unlikely of places.  We might be surprised life turns out to not mean what we meant it to mean.

Yours, Alex