Meaninglessness and the Paradox of Hope

I spent the last two days doing work I’m profoundly grateful for – working with a leadership team of an insurance company to deal with their lifelong patterns and their shadow. I was particularly struck by the comments of one man today as he was wrestling with some of the stuff in front of him. What was up for him was how the heck to reconcile his lone wolf tendencies, to fight a lifelong learning that “if you need to get it done, you gotta do it yourself and you can’t trust anyone” born out of a childhood legacy, to understand how much of a difference that it makes to his employees when he's present and in relationship with them, and to feel tugged and torn between his need for aloneness and the need for community. This, then, is the experience of fragmentation with that we struggle with to be born out of.

My colleague and I used this Dali image to evoke thought. One of my clients today said that looking at the image incited a bit of panic in her, noting that the head was inside and was trying to emerge blindly from that shell. What does it evoke in you? For me, there are so many layers to it. It speaks to the difficulty of change, how much of a struggle it can be for the emerging self to be born out of the containers and context in which one traps oneself. There’s something too about the elastic nature of the egg that’s a bit insidious. Sometimes when you think you've stretched one of your own old tendencies to where it's no longer confining, it can snap back and smack you in the ass. One of the other themes that emerged in speaking to this painting for me is the reconciliation of loss with the freedom of moving into a larger context.  You lose the womb, being within the delusion of what is defined and has clarity and edges. Learning to deal with loss is part of that opening into a larger world.  Why would you even go there? Hope of something “better”? 

 The word "powerless" struck a memory of listening to the mythologist Michael Meade, whose work is just incredible. He talked about a UN report that asked the people of different countries what was wrong with the world, and bracketed the lists of issues into four major buckets: cultural loss, political problems, economic issues, and environmental concerns. In summation, there is a sense of rootlessness for cultural loss, powerlessness in the face of mounting political issues globally, ruthlessness in economic issues, and hopelessness around environmental concerns - and the collective experience is one of meaninglessness.

This is the reality we live: aspiring to be our best, longing for and sometimes finding meaning and connection within ourselves and that which is larger than ourselves, we are undone by messy bathrooms, traffic jams, and burnt toast. I am not interested in a spirituality that cannot encompass my humanness….Beneath the small daily trials are harder paradoxes, things that the mind cannot reconcile but the heart must hold if we are to live fully: profound tiredness and radical hope; shattered beliefs and relentless faith; the seemingly contradictory longings for personal freedom and a deep commitment to others, for solitude and intimacy, for the ability to simply be with the world and the need to change what we know is not right about how we are living.”

 Obama's book is called "The Audacity of Hope". (I haven't read it yet, though I did read "Dreams of My Father". I love the title in the way that I love "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" as a title, and "The Answer to How is Yes", despite again not having read those books either. Just a note, I actually do read more than the titles of books. :) It takes a certain audacity to hope, though what is fascinating about hope is the paradox it can take to hold it. Emily Dickenson said that, “To hope means to be ready at every moment for that which is not yet born, and yet not become desperate if there is no birth in our lifetime.“ Hope is a funny thing, beyond “thing of feathers that perches in the soul”. And I wonder what Emily hoped for, to come to know it so well and the paradox in the nature of it. It’s a very odd thing to let longing rise, to not suppress it and the discomfort of it, while simultaneously holding that it may never be met. 

 One, from D.M. Dooling in the book "The Spirit of Quest" -

As Mircea Eliade has shown in Images and Symbols, the search for centrality expressed in myths and rituals across the globe is the search for the truly human position, the midpoint and link between heaven and hell, angel and animal; the specifically human function of the reconciliation of the opposites by which life becomes whole and holy, eternal, no longer divided, and at last “makes sense”. The search for salvation, or immortality, however we understand those terms, is first and foremost the search for that in oneself that is more than mortal.

What are we? The Elegies seek a measure of humanness that is positive in form, one that goes beyond the painful recognition that we are neither totally natural in the way that animals are, nor totally transcendent as angels are. The emphasis on ‘are’ comes from the despair over the split of consciousness that hangs us ‘between current and stone,’ between the flow of our inner experience and the rigidity of our interpreted world, thus making it impossible for us to be ‘something one’ or something that remains constant. To be an ‘I’ means to be constantly caught between the polarities of the night and the day world, of animal and angel, of man and woman, of sexuality and spirituality, of hero and lover, of inner and outer world, of life and death, and never to be at one with any of it. The Duino Elegies do not overcome or eliminate this lament, but the cycle tries to give meaning to the split by giving consciousness a direction towards ‘the open.’”