Most of Life
Bagging your own groceries, pumping your own gas, booking flights, concert tickets, and movie passes online—so many ways we have become self-reliant. That should be my happy thought, as I consider all the ways people now do for themselves what once an employee did. Yet the fabric of interaction feels thin when everything is self-serve, self-pay, self-check-in, self-checkout, self self self. Don’t we want people with us in our world? I do. I make a point at the supermarket of standing in line so the checker can scan my purchases because I prefer a person, not a machine, asking how I want to pay. She’ll keep her job longer, too, if she has people to help.
Still, the more I can do without help, the better. Increasingly, however, I feel not strong and independent by managing on my own, but, rather, uncertain. It is a great comfort to find someone who will help me fill out a form or take my phone and swipe in all the right directions to activate whatever is needed. “Let me tell you” or “Let me show you” are music to my ears, but I prefer letting the kind person go one step further and do. It’s like the maxim: You don’t need the answers, just the number of the person who’s got them.
Many people, old and young, are more expert than I at using computers, tablets, and smartphones. I’m glad to let them exercise their expertise. Or fixing cars, heaters, chainsaws—I let them handle my mechanical contraptions. Or curing my back, my cat, my leaky hot water heater. Have at it! But what I need even more than these experts is the expert at living: the guru, swami, mentor, or life coach. I’ve also heard “selfhood consultant”—someone who can tell me what I’m doing right and what I’m not, to make the most of life. When you are young, parents serve this role. Then you grow up and should know how to live well. Yet the number of people turning to therapists and other “life experts” shows how hard it is to get it right. Why, there is even a Stanford course called “Designing Your Life”; the teachers wrote a book with the same name.
If you don’t have a custom-designed life but something patched together, as I do, you might feel insecure. Even if you don’t at first, once existential doubt creeps in, you may wonder where you went wrong. For some, boredom is the tell-tale sign something isn’t right; for others, anxiety—or loneliness. Some lucky few—or many?—never ask themselves questions about meaning or purpose, but I do. For me, the sign all is not well is a feeling of emptiness. I ask, “Is this all there is?” I seem to have no backbone; I begin to collapse.
Like someone responding to the first signs of a cold with vitamin C and extra fluids, I use distraction to head off my troubling inquiry at the first hint. “Interesting question!” I tell myself, “But I have no time for it!” Instead, I have a footrace to run, a friend to write to, or a baby to play with while its mother is busy—all substitutes for the backbone that lets a person stand tall and straight, that gives support and shape. Without that backbone of confidence and satisfaction, I am a clinging vine without a post. I cannot hold up.
My mother has no such feelings of purposelessness. When I report on my state, she reminds me that I once said if I had writing, I had purpose. I am lucky enough to have a venue for my writing. And yet, though I am kept busy by this column, I now know even writing is not enough. I still have that niggling feeling I am wasting my life. To paraphrase Townes Van Zandt’s 1971 song “To Live Is to Fly”: Most of life is wasting time; God knows I’ve wasted most of mine.
My fear is not that I have missed the turnoff into happy pastures, where worries evaporate like morning dew and time is gloriously replete. Because if I’m the one who’s gone astray, I could turn back and continue looking. No, my fear is that we all have missed it—because that lush green field doesn’t exist. So don’t ask your swami, guru, mentor, or life coach for directions. Especially don’t ask your selfhood consultant. They don’t know. But they may have good advice on surviving great disappointment.
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