What is life asking of me?
This is the question that rose to the surface as I listened to Gautam Srikishan’s meditative music emanating from my laptop. Krista Tippett and her On Being guests have collectively been one of my spiritual teachers for so many years, but last week was the first time I’d participated in a real-time gathering. A solstice pause, to reflect on the year past, and to replenish ourselves in community for the year ahead.
The finiteness of each of our lives – and of my life in particular – is never far from my consciousness. But this year I’ve felt it more viscerally than ever before. As Sir David Attenborough said memorably on our responsibility towards the future of life on Earth:
It is impossible, other than lying down and dying, to cease [emitting carbon dioxide and contributing to climate change]. What we have to think about is that the carbon dioxide […] is not being misspent.
I love this way of framing the issue. It makes it clear that there is almost always a trade-off, a choice, that we simply can’t do All The Things in our finite lives. And for someone like me, who identifies as a multipotentialite, that’s sobering.
So, what is life asking of me?
I have been struggling with this question in one form or another for as long as I can remember.
And the answer is… I don’t know.
I feel like I’m edging closer to an answer this year, settling back into the country in which I was born, transitioning fully into the aptly named ‘for-purpose’ sector, exploring with more intent the caring professions. But I can’t help feeling that it’s not enough, that with all the privilege I was born into and luck that has come my way, I have a responsibility to do more.
Pixar’s beautiful 2020 creation Soul reminds us not to get too caught up in our quest for Purpose with a capital P, that our spark is often best found in “regular old living”. Like so many things, I think the answer, at least for me, will involve both. Finding the right meta-stable state between my inner compass that drives me relentlessly to contribute more to this world; and simply being, embracing the fullness of life.
Krista Tippett, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke, refers often to living the questions. That when we have a question for which we do not yet have an answer, we are called to not seek the answer but to hold and to live the question, hoping to live eventually into the answer. This is easier some days than others. But I often find that this liminal period between Christmas and the new year, what Germans refer to as Zwischen den Jahren, lends itself specially to ‘holding’ these larger questions.
What question are you holding as you cross the threshold from this year to the next?