There is
an insightful comment from the novelist Virginia Woolf in her search for
purpose in life. She had often come to detours and dead ends. There were high
moments of discovery and low times of nagging self-doubt. In a personal essay she
concluded, “What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one
that tended to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never
come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little
daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”
It is
such a magnificent comment.
Most of
us at some point in our lives, often in mid-life or our later years, look back
over it all and wonder what any of it meant. We see people we loved for the
wrong reasons. Relationships that ended badly. Pathways we should have never
taken. Choices we knew were questionable but made them anyway often with
regret.
We see
good times, laughter and celebrations, deep love; that fun concert, the
hilarious bachelor or bachelorette party, the touching wedding, the birth of a
child, a career achievement, helping a stranger, weeping at funerals, not in
sorrow but simply remembering significant times with someone close and dear to
us.
Life is a
balance of all of this. We become mature, responsible people when we learn to
move into the flow of this mixture of experiences; when we finally find a
balance from them.
My son
Caleb called me last week to tell me that one of their neighborhood children,
my grandson Austin’s best little friend, was hit by a car while riding his
bicycle. He was killed instantly. Eight years old. A beautiful, happy boy.
The
neighborhood was engulfed in sorrow. Austin and my granddaughter Avery were
stunned by the loss of their little friend. Caleb and Kameron were in shock. The
child’s parents lost in that undertow of grief where one seems to be slowly
drowning in heartbreak and agony.
Life
comes into clear focus in these moments, and, removed from all the distractions
that confine us, we see the mystery, the complexity, the incomprehensibleness
of it all. And finally, we think of what truly matters to us.
Death,
tragedy, debilitating illness, loss, are inextricably woven into the fabric of
our lives. We cannot escape them. As are enormous joys, new discoveries,
ecstatic celebrations, transforming affections, and profound love.
It is in
accepting this that we find some sense of balance. No one lives very far into
life without experiencing some, if not all, of these beautiful and deeply conflicting
things.
There is
something writer and essayist, Rebecca Solnit, has written that reflects all of
this. It is a long quote, but stay with it. It is so relevant:
“The
world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got
lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance
from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in
water. Water is colorless, shallow water appears to be the color of whatever
lies underneath it, but deep water is full of this scattered light, the purer
the water the deeper the blue. The sky is blue for the same reason but the blue
at the horizon, the blue of the land that seems to be dissolving into the sky,
is a deeper, dreamier, melancholy, blue, the blue at the farthest reaches of
the places where you see for miles, the blue of distance. This light that does
not touch us, does not travel the whole distance; the light that gets lost,
gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue.”
There is
something amazingly comforting about this for me.
Solnit’s description of the color blue is a beautiful metaphor of this balance in life I’m talking about.
How a mixture of deep and shallow, of light and distance, all work together to
give us a majestic color. And the light that gets lost? Wow. That is the
mystery we all have to embrace. Because in doing so, we arrive at a sense of
balance that finally gives meaning to life; that ultimately brings all the elements together to give it
breathtaking color.
© 2019
Timothy Moody
Comments
Post a Comment