The desire to make a difference--the abiding search for meaning--grows with each passing decade, hand-in-hand with matters of the spirit and with our awareness that one day our physical presence on this Earth will come to an end. Our lives are longer, yet still finite.
Ernest Becker writes in The Denial of Death: "The only worthwhile preoccupation of man: What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? What does a person dedicate him or herself to beyond the purely personal?"
Fidelity to such a life-affirming sense of purpose, beyond (and yet including) the self, is often referred to as a calling. In the Judeo-Christian use of the term, God calls the faithful to service. The Buddhist and Islamic notion of right livelihood holds a similar meaning for many. In a secular context, we might say that it is society that calls one to serve.
Our quest to locate and pursue that life-giving force is the most honest and brave way of facing our greatest anxiety, albeit one that's usually hidden even from ourselves: our own mortality. This search for purpose becomes even more important when we realize that the immortality motive may be the greatest human drive, as we strive to have tangible proof that who we are can outlive our bodily existence.
Creating the future, especially when it's wrapped up with our own mortality, seems like a pretty tall order.
Little wonder so many of us back away (and all of us back away at times) at future's door. We've said that our desire to create the world we want is often held back by our desire to be "realistic," to protect ourselves from disappointment, to avoid looking like a fool. It's only reasonable to tell ourselves the soothing story that what we want is just plain not possible, and besides, even if it were, we wouldn't deserve it and we couldn't make enough of a difference to matter.
Even the most courageous among us have these moments of doubt, as one of the heroes in this book wrote me after reading a draft of the manuscript. Rosemary Cairns, who shared her story of a meeting in northern Canada (and who is now working in a village in Serbia), said in her note, "Somehow I started to grieve about how powerful those default settings are--those messages in my childhood that say, 'You're getting above yourself' (what they used to say in Ireland, often). Somehow, I silence my own voice.
"There is a part of me that believes strongly in myself, and there is another part that is very uncertain."
Thank you, Rosemary, for saying it for me, and perhaps for others.
But as Steve Jobs put it so poignantly when he spoke to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University, "Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. ... There is no reason not to follow your heart."
When you and I attend to all that we have going for us (often right in front of us yet unseen, like an underground stream), we become aware that our choices are greater than we imagined. And we are emboldened to reach for those that matter most.
It is possible, although unusual, to talk about such aspirations in our public lives: in organizations of the social sector, in civic life, in the workplace. We can make space for conversations of consequence. We can talk about why we serve, why we give. We can allow what is most important to us, what we want our lives to be about and to have been about, to inform and strengthen our presence.
And whenever we do, we legitimize the pursuit of purpose and meaning, for ourselves and for others.
Once we acknowledge both the prospect of our own death and the promise that life holds, we gain our greatest power: the ability to use our lives to say something important, however small or large we may think it is. Our actions, our contributions, or just showing up in our own way, can send a message that means something to others, and even to ourselves.
If we make that choice for life, our civilization may not only be rescued from the worst of fates, we may be opened into the best of fates, beyond our imagination of today.
And along the way, you and I will come to know that we counted for something. That we mattered. That we were indeed alive.