The Meaning of Life

There are some of us who regularly feel a powerful need to go away and think rather more than is typically allowed or taken to be normal. This business of thinking can seem to us like one of the most meaningful things we ever do. After too long in company, we crave to be alone with our own minds. Raw experience proves too overwhelming, dense, messy, confused or exciting, and, on a regular basis, we long to sort through it, far away from distractions.

Training the body in an athletic pursuit can give us a glorious sense of physical mastery and momentary perfection.

Our encounter with nature calms us because none of our troubles, disappointments or hopes has any relevance to it.

Here, at last, is someone wholly indifferent to almost everything about us except for our dexterity at ball throwing; someone who doesn’t care about the Brussels meeting, who will forgive us for not warning the finance department in time about the tax rebates, and for whom the Singapore conference is beyond imagining.

One of the most consoling aspects of natural phenomena – whether a dog, a sheep, a tree or a valley – is that their meanings have nothing to do with our own perilous and tortured priorities. They are redemptively unconcerned with everything we are and want. They implicitly mock our self-importance and absorption and so return us to a fairer, more modest, sense of our role on the planet.

We are back from work unusually late. It has been a tricky day: a threatened resignation, an enraged supplier, a lost document, two delayed trains… . But none of the mayhem is of any concern to one friend waiting by the door, uncomplicatedly pleased to see us: Pippi, a two-year-old border terrier with an appetite for catching a deflated football in her jaws. She wants to play in the usual way, even if it’s past nine o’clock now, with us in the chair and her sliding around the kitchen, and, unexpectedly, so do we. We are not offended by her lack of overall interest in us. It is at the root of our delight. Here, at last, is someone wholly indifferent to almost everything about us except for our dexterity at ball throwing; someone who doesn’t care about the Brussels meeting, who will forgive us for not warning the finance department in time about the tax rebates

Acting politically, we can bring our most competent, purposeful selves to bear on a relatively limited set of issues in the lives of strangers, and therefore have a chance of succeeding. We are not trying to solve all the problems of others; we are merely working on one or two targeted areas and so are granted a precious encounter with ourselves as people with the will, imagination and intelligence to get things done. We are taken out of the morass of our own minds. We have the joy of trying to change the world, rather than wrestling with the far thornier task of wondering how to be happy.

Living in our own minds, we have a constant experience of impotence and failure. Much the same may hold true of our relationships with those close to us. We know how often our initiatives go nowhere, our plans are rebuffed, our intentions are ground down. Politics is a refuge from the problems of trying to make oneself and one’s loved ones smile. It is the best possible kind of selfishness.

Part of the reason why being interested in politics has traditionally had high prestige is that it seems a selfless act, a noble prioritising of communal over personal interests. But this too may be an unhelpful starting point, because it privileges a sacrificial impulse that few of us reliably experience. In reality, being political need have nothing to do with self-renunciation. Making strangers happy is deeply enjoyable, and a great deal easier than trying to make oneself or one’s immediate loved ones content.

When approached in the right way, travel can play a critical role in helping us to evolve; it can correct the imbalances and immaturities of our nature, open our eyes, restore

Our relationships are too compromised and fraught. It can feel too risky to be very nice to someone who might not reciprocate. So we don’t do much feeling; we freeze over. But then, in the pages of a story, we meet someone. Perhaps she is very beautiful, tender, sensitive, young and dying; we weep for her and all the cruelty and injustice of the world. And we come away, not devastated, but refreshed. Our emotional muscles have been exercised and their strength rendered newly available for our lives.