Life In Perspective

I sit here writing this at the center of my universe, as you sit there, reading it, at the center of yours.  We all feel separate from everyone else, in our own heads.  Even with the person closest to us, we cannot truly see the world through their eyes, or experience it from their center.  Each one of us feels special.  But there will be billions more people that live after we have died, each the center of their own universe, in 100 years, 1,000 years, in 100,000 years.  We’re just one of those grains of sand on the vast beach of history. 

With a few exceptions, all of us will be forgotten.  There are just a tiny number of remembered people in history, maybe a hundred that each of us could name, compared to the number of all people who have ever lived.  Even most of our American presidents will be forgotten in the next 100 years.  The celebrities our culture obsesses over will certainly not be remembered within a few hundred years.  And even if we were one of those few that were, does it matter after we’ve passed away and are unaware of it?

When I read about ancient times, experiencing what it must have been like to live in that time, it hits me that our current civilization is not very different from that civilization that existed 5,000 or 1,000 years ago.  When they were living, they felt they were the most advanced society.  They were on the forefront of technological development just like we are.  We are, right now, the ancient Egypt of some future civilization, if we’re lucky.  We may not even be one of those defining cultures that earn an entire chapter in the history books of the future.

Each generation’s youth feels they are at the top of the world, the top of their time, as if time will somehow end in their lifetime.  They look at old people with pity, as if they will never be old.  Time seems to move very slowly when we’re young.  We feel this way certainly through our 20’s and 30’s.  Later in life, as we age, we come to understand the cycle of life as we, at 50 years old, see younger people look at us the way we once looked at people in their 50’s.  Those kids will soon be 50 themselves and there will be a new batch of 20-year-olds to replace them, and so on, and so on. In the big scheme of things, we’re all relatively the same age, because this one life is so short compared to all of time.  Heck, the age of all mankind is just a blink of an eye in comparison to the age of our universe.

With all of this in mind, why do we sweat the small stuff the way we do, get so caught up in the drama of daily life?  Most of us feel blessed to live in this advanced and thriving country.  But should we envy the tribes people in primitive places that have such simple lives?   Most people hate the way they spend half their waking hours for 50 years of their lives.  This seems crazy when you remember the fragility of life, the fact that we’re a dot on the timeline of this tiny blue spec of a planet hurling through space at an inconceivably fast speed in a vast galaxy in an ever-expanding universe.

It may seem morbid to consider death, but it is only in an effort to accept what is true, and, as a consequence, have a more meaningful existence.  How would we live our lives differently if we reflected on this every single morning?  Would we quit our jobs?  Leave an abusive marriage? Tell someone you love them? Go on a trip? Join a monastery?  Try to squeeze every ounce of pleasure and joy possible out of this existence?  I believe the litmus test is the question “do I enjoy this?”  But how do we balance basic needs for food and shelter, physical comfort, with the enjoyment of life? 

The Dalai Lama says that the only purpose of life is to find happiness for ourselves.  Far from being selfish, this is the path to being more generous, more loving, and making more of a positive difference in this world.  But happiness or enjoyment do not simply mean the pursuit of empty pleasures. It means experiencing true joy and inner peace on a regular basis, feeling comfortable in our skin in any situation, liking and loving ourselves and other people.

We can design our lives with intention each and every day, asking the questions, “What aspects of my life do I honestly enjoy and not enjoy?  What obligations should be eliminated if I disregard hollow cultural pressures?”  But we cannot eliminate everything in life that we don’t enjoy.  There are some things we must do that are not enjoyable in the moment that bring us growth and enjoyment, happiness, or peace of mind in the future.