The meaning of life.

“It’s not so much the meaning of life we are seeking but our aliveness.  When we have that the meaning of life is obvious.”

               
                            -Anodea Judith

In my early twenties I went through a period of heavy existential crisis.  Living often felt like slogging through a waist-deep marsh—slow, thick and murky.  It took a lot of energy to get anywhere.  I spent my time studying and reading and doing all of the things you are supposed to do when you are in college.  I was intellectually engaged and somewhat productive creatively but I was very disconnected from life itself.  I took up the task of dwelling on the Big Questions.  What does it all mean?  Who am I?  What the hell am I supposed to do in this life?  You know these, right?  A few weeks ago I stumbled upon the quote above and it blew me away with its simplicity and its truth.  It puts a deep and sharp perspective on my entire course of life as a twenty-something.  It simply nails a notion I have learned and experienced countless times in the past five years, that sitting around thinking about living sucks and actually living is really great.

After I finished college I began an intense period of reconnection.  I travelled and had adventures in beautiful places and lived in cultures with fundamentally different outlooks than my own.  To finance this I worked as a wilderness guide and leader for therapeutically oriented programs.  I spent the better part of 3 years sleeping on the ground and waking with the sun.  I can think of no more direct way to get out of your head and into your body.  You know those moments in life where the little voices go away for a chunk of time, and when they come back you feel “wow that was living”?  I had lots of those.  Even better, it’s possible to catch these moments as they happen, to be aware of them as you live them.  I remember waking up on a bus in the Amazon one time and simply knowing how alive I was.  There was a blue stream blasting under a bridge and there was green life dancing in the sun.  There were cows… 

Anyway you get it, I woke up.  The sun and the wind and the drastic variation of life all over the place made thinking and worrying and pondering impossible.  I never knew such bliss existed.  I semi-knowingly adopted this sense of feeling as an overarching approach to life.  I did not chase money, success or affirmation; I hunted experience.  Somehow I had the sense and the balance to do this while building a career and a long-term relationship as well as a continually deepening sense of self.  It was a good time.  It still is.

It is very important to highlight how important the concept of meaning is to young men in the period of time between high school and full independence.  Here it is necessary to construct or adopt a sense of direction and a sense of purpose.  This sense doesn’t need to be set in stone and helps to hold it with healthy flexibility, but without guidance there is room for wandering.  Wandering is probably good to a certain degree but it can also turn into floundering, wallowing, even drowning.  My mom’s simple wisdom has always been that one needs a reason to get out of bed in the morning.  I couldn’t agree with her more, and I know that right now in our society there are countless young men without a reason to get out of bed. 

I don’t want to spend too much time on societal diagnosis but I want to offer one quick hypothesis: that many of these lost young men have been presented with possible futures that simply aren’t acceptable.  If the life of your parents isn’t desired or sufficient and there is no other adult guide to turn to, these young men having nothing to go on.  There is no example, no blueprint.  It is here that I think a conscious look at the concept of mentoring can be incredibly powerful.  The best evidence I can give you for this is my own life.  At each critical stage in my life I can give you the man that gave me the structural presence to know how to move ahead.  Mike, John, Jim, Ben; these are the men that I learned and benefited from immensely.  They were my teachers, professors, bosses, and coworkers; but more importantly they gave me living examples of what being a wonderful man looks like.  Never with any of these men did we sit down and talk about any of this, rather the fundamental and natural process of mentoring did what it does the way it is supposed to.

The greatest commonality I can see between my impressive cast of mentors is that they were incredibly alive.  Working alongside John at the farm was pure experience. Hiking down an ancient path with Jim was unadulterated expression.  A cup of coffee with Ben in the morning was quiet and simple and good.  All of these men had lives and struggles and so much beyond what I knew of them, but so I was able to share moments of living with them that impacted me directly and beautifully.

Now as I work with young men I carefully bring my awareness to these unspoken, wildly important aspects of the work.  We can set goals and get motivated and gain tools and skills and all of this is necessary and wonderful but I can’t help but think that the real work is done in a more direct and unspoken fashion.  It may have everything to do with simply being there and being alive, authentically addressing the moment as a man, as another human being.  By giving intention and attention to these young men, something big and real and so necessary happens. 

If you have words to describe this please bring them on.  Plenty more on this to come…