Justin’s words resonate with me because I also have young twins, a boy and a girl. I also used to live a fun, artsy, happily self-centered life – in my case, I was trying to become a rock star in San Francisco and working in various dot com startups (this was the 90’s when if you could fog a mirror you could get a job). I spent my free time, of which I had a lot, rock climbing. When you’re clinging by your fingertips to a rock face three hundred feet up, rock climbing does a decent job of getting you thinking about mortality. It’s all wide sky and warm rock and a view that looks like you’re already gazing down from heaven. During those days, it certainly crossed my mind that I could die by falling from the face of a cliff. But it never occurred to me that I might die just by becoming old. It never occurred to me that my body might someday simply stop working.
As Justin described with his family, once my husband Jeff and I had kids, they become the rock stars in our universe. No more rock climbing or rock music for me, at least any time soon. There was a real loss in this – I know that many of you know this loss. Now I was clinging by my fingertips with two other people on my back! And they needed me right now. The Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral writes, “Many things can wait. Children cannot. Right now their bones are being formed, their blood is being made, and their senses are being developed. To them we cannot answer, ‘Tomorrow.’ Their name is today.” One thing parenting did for me was that it forced me to take life seriously. I wanted to be a good mother and I wanted to be a good partner and I wanted to my life to be about something beyond pleasure. And I knew now with greater certainty and not a little fear that someday my time on this earth would be up. And so I couldn’t put off anything any more.
This is true for each of us, no matter how old we are, how healthy we are, no matter whether we’re parents or partnered or single, watching TV or clinging to a rock face. We cannot put off anything any more. Each of us is going to die. None of us knows when. It could be in two years. For some of us it could be 70 years from now. For any of us it could be this afternoon. And when we die, we are going to want our lives to have been meaningful. Actually, we don’t just want our lives to be meaningful; we need it. Finding meaning in our lives is a fundamental human need. We need to know why we’re here. What are we living for? Not just what do we want from life, but what does life want from us? We need meaning.
Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who spent three years in Nazi concentration camps came to this conclusion as he watched himself and his fellow prisoners struggle to survive the cruelty of the camps. The experience was designed to strip them of selfhood and purpose, taking away every freedom – months and years of nothing but suffering to be followed by almost certain death. Frankl realized that in this desperate world, where you would think that talk of meaning would be a inaccessible, unaffordable luxury, it was, in fact the only thing that could keep a person spiritually and psychologically whole. His famous insight was that everybody there – and by extension, every one of us – at every moment had a choice. They could choose who they would be and how they would respond to the circumstance life had handed them. Their suffering could be meaningful or meaningless.
He writes, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts, comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – the ability to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Why would someone who is literally starving to death give away his last piece of bread? The need to respond to the call of life – to find meaning and purpose in the moment – was even stronger than the primal need for food. Frankl doesn’t say what became of the men who did that. Maybe his editor made him cut the next line that said, “The poor souls died of hunger that night.” But I don’t think so. I think the message was that by giving when they had nothing left to give, these men found the power to survive.
Frankl is very clear that it’s not that we make or invent the meaning of our lives. We, in his word, “detect” it. We discover it. It almost sounds mystical, though he doesn’t use that term. Life hands us a circumstance, confronts us with a choice, and challenges us to respond. And while the meaning of the act ultimately is epic, the act itself is always tiny and concrete. It’s always today – right now and right now and right now – that we’re living our lives. It doesn’t work to say that our lives are too difficult or too constrained by circumstance to worry about the big questions. In every moment we make decisions and micro-decisions that together, over days and years, form the substance of our lives. It was a lifetime of such decisions that shaped the meaning of Harper Lee’s life. And that of Antonin Scalia. It will be a lifetime of such decisions that make meaning of my life and yours.
There’s something strangely parallel between the experience of rock climbing and the experience of parenting newborn twins – there’s the stark immediacy of simple acts – nursing, changing a diaper, like reaching for the next tiny ridge in the rock – that rivets your attention on the present moment… that, combined with the sweeping panoramic view – the sense of vertigo looking at these tiny babies, these massive responsibilities, a link to the past and the future. The camera is always zoomed in for the close up and zoomed out for the wide shot at the same time. It’s breathtaking and sobering.
I believe we are each challenged to live our lives with this dual vision. On one hand we are challenged to reach for meaning in our lives, to remember our mortality, to take our lives seriously, to live in awe of the view. And at the same time, we are challenged to live the present, to focus on the decisions in front of us at every moment. Gabriela Mistral wrote that children cannot wait; to them we cannot answer tomorrow; their name is today. But really, but nothing else can wait either. Whatever it is that’s calling us, whatever it is that needs us – whether it’s family or this community or our students, our clients, struggling peoples, or the earth itself – whatever we are being called to serve, its bones are being formed, its blood is being made. To whatever it is that calls us, we cannot answer “tomorrow.” Its name is “today.”