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What is life asking of me?
“We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which life constantly sets for each individual.”
Life is filled with vampire problems.
Every time you make a commitment to something big, you are making a transformational choice.
What makes transformational choices especially tough is that you don’t know what your transformed self will be like or will want, after the vagaries of life begin to have their effects.
It’s really hard to know your current self, but it’s pretty well impossible to know what your future transformed self will be like.
For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing. “It is remarkable that I am never quite clear about the motives for any of my decisions,”
One problem with the individualistic view, as always, is that it traps people in the small prison of the self. If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self.
After dissociation, you come to that terrifying time when the love in a marriage seems to dry up. Sometimes marriages truly are dead. Neither partner can hurt the other any longer, because neither really cares. In that case, divorce happens. But in other cases the embers are still warm, and the marriage just needs an act of courageous recommitment. And that is the next course in the curriculum of marriage: the art of recommitment.
When the well of love dries up, it takes an act of will to dig a little deeper. “It is a deliberate choosing of closeness over distance, of companionship over detachment, of relationship over isolation, of love over apathy, of life over death,” Mike Mason writes.
Marriage, like all commitments, isn’t there to make you happy; it is there to make you grow.
Recommitment often means putting your own sins on the table. Forbearance means acknowledging the wrongs that have been committed, and even the anger that they have created, but it puts anger in the context of love.
Second love is the kind of love people have for each other after they’ve seen each other at their worst, after they’ve forgiven a few times and been forgiven, after they can take some pride in having survived together and some comfort in the knowledge that they will survive. This is the person you will be with. This is your life. Second love is second-mountain love—after the thrill of the first mountain, the valley of suffering, and now up on the heights of your larger and more selfless life together.
Village over self. A good person inconveniences himself for the sake of his community. A bad person inconveniences the community for the sake of himself.
During this complicated time we are in, as a society, it would be wonderful if we could come together in solidarity for the collective group.
That’s how community works. Somebody starts something. A new tradition is established. Other people step in and carry it on.
The first mountain is the individualist worldview, which puts the desires of the ego at the center. The second mountain is what you might call the relationalist worldview, which puts relation, commitment, and the desires of the heart and soul at the center.
we have overdone it with the individualist worldview. By conceiving of ourselves mostly as autonomous selves, we’ve torn our society to shreds, opened up division and tribalism, come to worship individual status and self-sufficiency, and covered over what is most beautiful in each human heart and soul.
The heart is that piece of us that longs for fusion with others. We are not primarily thinking creatures; we are primarily loving and desiring creatures. We are defined by what we desire. We become what we love. The core question for each of us is, Have we educated our emotions to love the right things in the right way?
The soul yearns for goodness. Each human being wants to lead a good and meaningful life, and feels life falling apart when it seems meaningless.
around adolescence, the ego begins to swell, and the heart and soul recede. People at this age need to establish an identity, to carve a self. Meanwhile, our society tells adolescent boys to bury their emotions and become men. It tells little girls that if they reveal the true depths of themselves, nobody will like them. Our public culture normalizes selfishness, rationalizes egoism, and covers over and renders us inarticulate about the deeper longings of the heart and soul.
They realize that only emotional, moral, and spiritual food can provide the nourishment they crave.
The movement toward becoming a person is downward and then outward: To peer deeper into ourselves where we find the yearnings for others, and then outward in relationship toward the world. A person achieves self-mastery, Maritain wrote, for the purpose of self-giving.
Joy is found on the far side of sacrificial service. It is found in giving yourself away. When you see that, you realize joy is not just a feeling, it is a moral outlook. It is a permanent state of thanksgiving and friendship, communion and solidarity. This is not an end to troubles and cares. Life doesn’t offer us utopia. But the self has shrunk back to its proper size. When relationships are tender, when commitments are strong, when communication is pure, when the wounds of life have been absorbed and the wrongs forgiven, people bend toward each other, intertwine with one another, and some
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