Between the Dark and the Daylight: Encountering and Embracing the Contradictions of Life (7 page)

Failure gives us the chance to experiment with life, to play with it a bit, to move in different directions until we find, as we learned from Cinderella as children, the shoe that fits. Because what doesn’t fit will irritate us all our life. We will live in the unnecessary pain that comes from forcing ourselves into something that not only embarrasses us but cramps our hearts and damps our spirits.

Life is about participating in the fine art of finding ourselves—our talents, our confidence, our sense of self, our purpose in life. The world waits for each of us to give back to the best of our ability what we have been given for its sake. The only way to know what that is depends on learning to follow our hearts until our hearts and our abilities are one, until what we love and what we do well are one and the same thing.

That is the prescription that leads always and forever to happiness. What greater success can there possibly be?

“Success,” Ben Sweetland points out, “is a journey, not a destination.” The very act of exploring possibilities in life is one more step up the ladder of success. What we reject—or what rejects us—along the way has a great deal to tell
us
about life, about happiness, about ourselves. It is the soul’s search for what it means to come home to the self.

About life we learn that it is not fair—if my definition
of
fair
is that I will get what I want as I go. No, some of what I want either I cannot do or it is simply not available to me. Surprise.

About happiness I learn that I can get a lot of what I want that does not really fit me no matter how much I want it and that it will make me miserable in the end.

About myself I learn that whenever I do well what I am capable of doing, it doesn’t make a bit of difference if it is perceived as a plum position or not: I will be outrageously happy doing it.

O. A. Battista unmasks the real from the unreal in life. He tells us, “You have reached the pinnacle of success as soon as you become uninterested in money, compliments or publicity.” Then, as long as you are doing what you like doing best, there is really no way you can fail.

“I’ve got a great ambition,” Thomas Carlyle wrote. “[It is] to die of exhaustion rather than of boredom.” It’s a lofty aim, of course, but it is important to remember that both dimensions of life—both ambition and boredom—threaten the quality of life. One by stretching a person beyond the limits of physical or mental endurance, the other by allowing the life that’s in us to stagnate, to languish, to waste away. The effects of both are equally pathological: Exhaustion drains us physically; boredom depletes the soul.

But the situation is even more complex than that.

Medicine warns about the effects of exhaustion, yes, but carefully so. Stress upon stress—unending stress—they tell us, can wear the human system to a frazzle, to the point where one organ after another collapses under the wear of
it. At the same time, they tell us in the next sentence, it is also true that good stress, stress that brings the system to its highest pitch—the heart pounding, the lungs full, the legs going at full bore—aerates the entire system, stretches it to its fullest, gives us life.

On the other hand, boredom smothers the heart to death and leaves us staring into space without a song to sing, a road to travel, or a reason to get up in the morning.

So, a person can die either way: by wearing down or by withering. Choose.

Me, I choose exhaustion. I’m with the better-to-burn-out-than-to-rust-out crowd. At least today. The question, of course, is, Why choose to extend the self rather than to save the self? And which is really which? And how does one choose between the two anyway when the night thoughts pull us this way and that: “I should quit; I must go on; I need to stop; I have so much to do yet. It’s all for nothing anyway. An inch at a time it’s changing.” Toss this way; roll that way. Which will it be?

The direction we choose lies in the tendency of the soul toward its own growth. If enough is enough for me, then I will settle down and wait for life to come to me. If it does. On the other hand, if no amount of life satisfies me unless it is all the life I can come by, then I will reach out running and grasp for it. I will spend every bit of energy I have in its service. It’s a matter of choosing to sit and watch the carousel of life go round or deciding to get up and ride it.

When the athlete steps over the finish line, bends halfway to the ground, breathing hard and gasping for
more, it is years of practice and self-denial and commitment that crosses that line. It is years of the kind of unremitting, austere discipline that would make a monk cringe in shame. And it doesn’t really matter whether the athlete wins the race or not. The fact is simply that they ran it. They spent their entire lives preparing for these three minutes, for the right to be among the runners of life, with all their hearts.

But what can we possibly get from such toil, such drudge, such grind that makes that kind of exertion and sacrifice and pain worthwhile? The answer is an easy one. We get the joy of achievement. To drive ourselves to our best in any arena—intellectual, physical, spiritual—is to know outside boundaries we never knew we had. At the same time, it taps into inner depths we never dreamed were there. It requires of us just one more stride, one more deep breath, one more final effort over and over and over again. And we give the most of ourselves because we have spent years storing it up to give.

It is a simple answer but it is the only one that comes back to us from the mirror. It is the effort that drops us tired on the field of life but feeling good about the exhaustion. It is the sheer joy of knowing that we gave back to life everything we were given when we came into it. It is the stamp of authenticity. It is spiritual fair trade.

Exhaustion tells us how really far we can go. It gives us a measure of ourselves that is realistic rather than fictional, honest rather than imaginary. It strips us of any false pretenses. We don’t lie awake at night, then, telling ourselves that we could do it if we wanted to do it, if we did a little
more of this, a little less of that. No, exhaustion tells us exactly what we are capable of doing rather than fooling us into thinking that we are something we are not. Exhaustion keeps us honest about ourselves.

There is a feeling of readiness for life that comes with having exhausted ourselves for something worthwhile. We know now that we are prepared for the next race life has to offer us. We know now that we can endure. Perhaps, even prevail. It is enough to enable us to bear every small burden so that when the great burdens come we will be there to carry our load.

The dull life, on the other hand, is a calm life, yes, and the bland life can claim a kind of unplumbed if not placid peace. But the purposeless life—life without passion, without commitment, without the investment of the whole self—is a vacuous life seeking a credible reason to bring energy to anything. More important, to be dull is not necessarily stressless, remember. “There is no fatigue so wearisome,” Charles Haddon Spurgeon writes, “as that which comes from lack of work.” The stress of stresslessness undoes the soul before it depletes the body.

The important choice in life, then, is to choose our stresses carefully. The good ones enliven us and give life to those around us. The bad ones give nothing to anyone, ourselves least of all.

One tastes life and finds it energizing; the other stares into space, vapid and empty of light. One shapes faces of stone and puts light in people’s eyes. The other raises lassitude to an art form. One rolls and tosses at night excited by the thought of tomorrow’s challenges. The
other rolls and tosses with dread for the coming of one more barren day.

No doubt about it: There is an energy in the exhaustion that comes from meeting life head-on, a signal to the world that we are here, a sign to ourselves that life for us has been everything it is meant to be.

The nice thing about the human body is that it wears out. It wears down. It can, as the Rule of Benedict says in chapter 64, be “overdriven.” To be more precise, the Rule is talking about the abbot or prioress in the chapter when it says, “They must so arrange everything that the strong have something to yearn for and the weak nothing to run from.”

The point is clear: Good leadership does not ask more of the worker than the worker is capable of doing. Whatever happened to that kind of wisdom? And how much further can we possibly go unless we rediscover the value of such an insight?

The really interesting aspect of such an ancient directive is that it was written in the sixth century, before lightbulbs, before humanity could do little or anything about
extending the day into the night and veritably erasing the difference between the two. In those days, when the sun went down, people went to bed. “Make hay while the sun shines,” the farmers said—and for good reason—since there was surely no way to make it otherwise. Days were measured from sunup to sundown. They were not divided into shifts. Darkness covered the earth and with it came silence, and rest, and recuperation time in preparation for the day to come.

It was a far cry from a world in which the Internet links the ends of the earth twenty-four hours a day. Before the Industrial Revolution engines did not continue to pound out bottle caps long after most workers went home for supper. Trucks did not race on in a mad dash to link the world’s cities so that packages of widgets would be delivered in twenty-four hours and modernity could triumph. The writing did not go on late into the night. The offices did not stay open. The problem solving did not continue. The schoolwork did not begin after the parties ended. Yesterday’s work did not get done in the middle of the night so that tomorrow’s work could start again in five more hours.

And human beings were not taking sedatives to cope with stress or drugs to calm down. The medical community was not warning people about the effects of sleep deprivation. And surgeons were not beginning another operation at the end of an eighteen-hour day.

We drive ourselves relentlessly from one exhaustion to another. We pace our societies by the pace of our computers. We conduct the major relationships of our lives—both professional and personal—according to the speed of our
communications. We measure ourselves by the amount of our productivity and every day we become more exhausted, less rested in body, spirit and mind, and so less capable of producing things, let alone of developing relationships, as a result. That’s not irony, that’s tragedy. And though we know it, we do not know what to do about it.

Now the question is a simple one: Are the ancient insights only that: ancient? Or are they wisdom because they have been carried down to every generation and found to be true?

Well, no less a person than Thomas Aquinas, easily considered the most brilliant man of the thirteenth century and a good candidate for every century after that, said about rest and recreation: “It is requisite for the relaxation of the mind that we make use, from time to time, of playful deeds and jokes.”

And in the sixteenth century, Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most prolific geniuses of all time, wrote: “Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer. Go some distance away because then the work appears smaller and more of it can be taken in at a glance and a lack of harmony and proportion is more readily seen.”

Point: The grind is destructive of both the person and the work. Unless the soul can be refreshed enough to think, to create, to recoup both its energy and its interest in the work at hand, there is no hope for either recall or creativity.

Every year surveys report the decline of U.S. excellence in one arena after another. Even our children—the hard workers, the ambitious, the bright and the beautiful—find themselves slipping in international competitions. Despite
how hard they work, despite how much they memorize, despite how long they study, despite how much they want to do well.

Maybe what we all need most is time to process what we already know so that we can put it together differently, even more effectively than ever before. Maybe we need to think a bit, out on a porch in a summer breeze, down by the creek when the trout are running, back in the garden when it’s time to put the beets and beans in again.

Turn off the television and read a good book. Quit texting and ride your bike. Close the computer and go to a movie. Don’t answer any emails. Don’t try to “get ahead.” Don’t take any callbacks. And during the family dinner, turn off the phone. And when the television is on, watch it instead of talking through it. Reclaim your life, your thoughts, your personality, your friends, your family.

No, the world will not end. And no, the rest of the staff will not get ahead of you. They’ll be too tired to even think about catching up.

It’s time to sleep in like you did in the good old days. Have a late breakfast. Read the newspapers all day long. Call some friends in for a game of pinochle. And then, on Monday, go back to work—having really gotten away from it all—feeling like what you have to do is really worth doing. As Ashleigh Brilliant says, “Sometimes the most urgent and vital thing you can possibly do is take a complete rest.”

As the proverb teaches, “A good rest is half the work.” At least, that is, if you really want to be productive.

One of the few things we can be sure to discover as life goes by is that perfection is perfectly impossible, if for no other reason than that nobody really knows what that means. What does it mean to be perfectly honest when we give false hope to a dying mother? What does it mean to be perfectly obedient when we kill one person to save another? What does it mean to be perfectly loving and care more for one child than the rest of them? What does it mean to wake up in the middle of the night saying to ourselves, Why do I always do it wrong?