The purpose of life

I went to a Church of England Primary school, a very long time ago. It’s the main reason I have some knowledge of Biblical stories and the like. I knew I wasn’t Christian, but I also knew it was advisable to let people assume that I was. My parents had told me as much. That was back in the bad old days when Pagan people really did worry that social workers would take their children away.

I can remember sitting in religious assemblies, thinking how comforting it must be to believe in all this stuff about Jesus. There was nothing within me that enabled me to experience it as anything other than stories. My other early religious thinking had a curious flavour. I listened to all the stories, and I got the message about how we are supposed to be noble, self-sacrificing, heroic, brave, and do the right things. I noticed that in stories for children, this opportunity to shine depends entirely on the presence of a bad guy to triumph over. The Christians had Satan. I came to the conclusion that if there is a God and he wants you to be a hero, his creations will be all the evil things, all the dragons and monsters, so that you have something to be heroic over. Thieves, I reasoned, were closer to God, and the rest of us had a lot of hoops to jump through.

I’d picked up on the Christian idea of the reformed sinner, and I thought that was wholly unfair. The Prodigal Sons who go out there, mess up big time, come back and are loved and adored. Having been the sort of child who tried, and mostly didn’t do much that was naughty, much less wicked, it was clear to me I could not get any mileage out of this one. Reformed sinners were always going to be more loveable.

Then there was the whole thing about the purpose of life being to help others. I remember thinking ‘who are the others supposed to help?’ and realising this is a system wholly dependent on there being impoverished, diseased victims of misfortune, so that we who were not ‘others’ had a purpose to our lives. That made me deeply uncomfortable.

Around me, the eighties rolled on with enthusiasm, most of my peers more concerned about the music charts and their florescent socks. I did not fit, and no one wanted to talk about what life was for. They were all too busy doing it, and I felt curiously like an outsider, watching from the side-lines, unable to figure out the rules of the game. I missed out, somewhere early, on any notion at all that my life might be mine. My opportunity to live, feel and experience. My chance for joy and love. I can’t remember a time when I did not have a keen sense that my job was to please and appease and be of service to others. I never learned how to play, as a child, only how to pretend to play when required to look the part. Doing fun things just for me and because I want to has never come naturally or easily, and because of that legacy, always comes with a side order of guilt. How can I be reading a non-improving sort of book when there are still wars, still famines…? How can I spend money going to the cinema when that could buy food for a hungry person? How can I say ‘no’ to the friends who want me to go to the cinema with them?

On the flip side, as a parent with a child to care for, providing some kind of normal and sane experiences has seemed important. That’s given me a useful sort of counterpoint. Of course he needs to go to the cinema, and he needs trips out. I can show up if I feel like I’m supporting someone else, and not feel too guilty over the time off.

But here’s the stupid thing. I do not aspire to a world of puritan martyrs. I do not think the point of life is to work yourself to death for hopeless causes. The things I was taught to believe and feel, from as far back as I can remember I just would not apply to anyone else. This is not a case either of having singled myself out for sainthood (I’ve been accused of that, though). It’s not about imagining I am superior to everyone else and therefore must live to more exacting standards. It’s a basic failure to be able to feel entitled to my own life, on my own terms and for my own sake. It’s less a call to service, more of a life sentence. It is enough for other people to be here, to do what they do. No one else needs to explain, or justify anything. Breath by breath, I have to offer some proof that my taking up of carbon, space and energy is justified in some way. There are days when I find that really difficult.

I am a product of stories about what life is supposed to be for. I have been weighed down by those stories. Sometimes I have been crushed by them. “What do I want?” remains the most difficult, transgressive, problematic, dangerous sort of question for me. It took me a long time to learn how to ask it. Trying to answer it still scares me. We give our children casually thrown together life philosophies, and most of the time, I do not think we know what those stories do to them.