What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life

by James Hollis

remember what surrealist Paul Eluard once said: “There is another world, and it is this one.”

Still another deep level in which baseball functions for us all, and still does today, is that it provides a way for men to talk to each other. We are pathologically isolated from women, even more from each other, and even more still from ourselves. So, we need a bridge to help us over the abyss.

As a therapist, I know that I am always dealing with the invisible world, though it is a world at least as real as the world we see. (Indeed, it creates the world we see.)

Things fall apart . . . the center cannot hold, as Yeats proclaimed in 1917. And since that slippage began, most things we cherish have gone still farther south, fast. Yet certain moments abide, certain foolish passions continue to nourish and animate. Perhaps, even at this moment, it still is the bottom of the ninth, runners on second and third, 2 and 0 on the batter, and the pitch is loosed. . . . All is open, it seems, still; the game is on, now; the game is on, and we are in it.

Spiritual crises come to us for several reasons. Among them are: 1) trauma—personal or cultural; 2) autogenous swampland visitations; 3) discrepancies between expectations and outcomes; 4) incongruence between map and terrain; and 5) a dystonic relationship between false and natural self.

a “nervous breakdown” is a metaphor based on a mechanical, biological model. Nerves do not break down, but our “maps” do.

It has become clear to me, for example, that aging itself does not bring wisdom. It often brings regression to childishness, dependency, and bitterness over lost opportunities. Only those who are still intellectually, emotionally, spiritually growing inherit the richness of aging.)

in the words of T. S. Eliot, “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”

I am, of course, using the word myth here in an honorific sense, namely, as an energy-charged image, or idea, that has the power to move and direct the soul, hopefully in ways that link us more deeply to the mysteries of the cosmos, of nature, of relationship, and of self. Mythic systems, whether tribal, collective, or personal, convey images that arise from transcendent encounters—whether with the gods, natural events, the mystery we bring to each other in relationship, or the depths we find within ourselves.

When people say to me that they live without myth, then I know that they are unaware that most of our lives are in service to those splinter myths we call complexes. Complexes are fractal forms, charged with energies, compelling scripts, admonitions, and outcomes, which is why so much of our histories reveal patterns even though we righteously presume and proclaim our freedoms. No one lives without myth. Anyone who thinks so is very unconscious. The only question is what mythologems, what fragments, what admonitions, what retreats or flights, what tropic desires have sovereignty in our lives and make our choices for us.

(Synchronistically, a friend e-mailed me a cartoon showing a therapist saying to a client, “Look, making you happy is out of the question, but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery.”)

For the person with a high sensate function—the engineer, systems analyst, troubleshooter, accountant—the question is “How do the pieces best fit together?” For the pragmatist, for whom ideas are merely instruments, the question is “How well does it work, and what are the payoffs?” For the aesthetic sensibility the question presents as “What is its texture?” “What color or form appeals to me?” “What would it look like if I moved something over here instead?” All of these questions are expressions of primal wonder and represent a desire to connect with the invisible world that informs and drives the visible world.

“Though I am not against happiness,” I returned, “I do consider it to be a poor measure of the worth and depth of one’s life. Throughout history, the people who brought us the most often suffered greatly, and were scarcely happy carrots.”

Avoiding researching our story, claiming its paradoxes and contradictions as ours, is the chief preoccupation of modern life—a culture of addiction, distraction, and numbing.

How much of our daily life, our unfolding story, is driven by such ghostly search engines whose origins are found, in Shakespeare’s phrase, in “the dark backward and abysm of time”?

I know the routines very well and have performed, but when I see an antlered buck on the side of the road or a rock that sparks fascination, or a grocer who is especially kind, I feel alive.

Former Illinois governor and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson observed that the moral measure of a nation is not found in its GNP, but in how it treats its least-advantaged citizens.

One crude distinction has been offered: Generally speaking, the neurotic is a problem to him/herself, and the personality disorder is a problem to others.

I recall saying to a woman who finally escaped an abusive relationship with a sociopath: “You are free of him now.” “But,” she answered, “he never seems to have to deal with the consequences. He always skates off to ruin somebody else’s life.” “Yes, that seems true, but he always has to live with an emptied soul,75 and you don’t . . . anymore.”

As the novelist William Faulkner once observed, the past is not dead; it is not even past.

We do not do crazy things; we do logical things, if we understand the “reason” that generates our behaviors. The “reason” may be inaccurate, a misreading of the world, true only for a particular moment and place, or even the inheritance of someone else’s story,

I have come to consider most of what passes for “self-help” literature today as obscene because it ignores the complexities of life, glosses over the ardor and commitment required for change, and promises panaceas not likely to happen. These banal insults to the depth of our souls will almost always end with disappointment, disillusionment, or further self-castigation, for they ignore the immense power of fate, which is to say, the sovereignty of the gods. Add to that the humbling reminder that the unconscious is unconscious, and we are compelled to respect even more the powerful currents that sweep us across a vast, tenebrous sea.

many times in the context of therapy I have said, in the face of painful, limiting blows that a person has suffered, that “the meaning of your life from this point on will be the degree to which you can express yourself more fully in the face of this situation.”

Tipping our hat to Fate, acknowledging that the gods choose the playing field upon which we find ourselves, we are still here to play the game. The object is not to win or lose, for that is already decided, and already irrelevant80—for us it is rather to be on the playing field, with utmost exercise of élan and investment of spirit to the end.

Camus imagines that he can see the face of Sisyphus at the bottom of the hill, facing the futile task once again, and, wait . . . is that a smile that plays across his face? Yes, in smiling, Sisyphus chooses to push the boulder back up the hill, and therein wrests from the gods his freedom. A pragmatist might argue, “Hey, same hill, same boulder, same outcome.” But life is more than outcomes; it is also attitude.

I am content to follow to its source Every event in action or in thought; Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse So great a sweetness flows into the breast We must laugh and we must sing, We are blest by everything, Everything we look upon is blest.84

The Greeks had a story about this: Tithonus, who was immortal but who grew to hate his life because his choices had ceased to matter. He could choose this path for this century, and then casually another for the next, and thus the years stretched meaninglessly through tendentious permutations of time.

Whatever we think, feel, believe, hope, from a limited ego frame, is literally irrelevant to the mystery of mortality itself. In death, either the ego is radically transformed in ways we cannot even imagine, or it is annihilated.

A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. . . . Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning . . . must pay for it with damage to his soul.

With a mature engagement with the mystery that our mortality demands, we may find that our goals change, and change significantly. We may begin to prize depth over abundance, humility over arrogance, wisdom over knowledge, growth over comfort, and meaning over peace of mind.

This middle ground asks that we respect symbol formations that are so clearly and universally represented in our psychological life, without necessarily converting them into presumptive metaphysical or eschatological “certainties.”

Experience shows that religions are in no sense conscious constructions, but that they arise from the natural life of the unconscious psyche and somehow give adequate expression to it. This explains their universal distribution and their enormous influence on humanity throughout history, which would be incomprehensible if religious symbols were not at the very least truths of man’s psychological nature.

As Lao-Tse said, “The Tao that can be named is not the Tao.” As Kierkegaard said, “The god that can be named is not God.” As Tillich said, “God is the God that appears out from behind the god that has disappeared.” Any God I would have “found” would have become an object, a noun, and not God the verb, an idol constructed by my limited consciousness, not a transcendent, transforming energy.

There is something larger than self, that we either mangle or make significant.

the agenda of the first half of life is forged from suffering demands of all kinds and responding to the blows, challenges, and seductions of life, while the second half of life has more to do with wrestling with the aftermath: guilt, anger, recrimination, regret, recovery, and the possibility of forgiveness of self and others.

In the end, having a more interesting life, a life that disturbs complacency, a life that pulls us out of the comfortable and thereby demands a larger spiritual engagement than we planned or that feels comfortable, is what matters most.

As one psychologist said to me in our first hour, “We all know that when it comes time to do our own work, we go to a psychodynamic therapist.”

As object only, the thing sought will in the end disappoint, prove partial, prove inadequate to the magnitude of the soul—as our materialistic obsessions have revealed to us over and over again. If objects made us happy, or fulfilled, or connected us to transcendent energies, then we would truly be the richest people in history instead of possibly the most spiritually impoverished.