Page 21 - Introducing The Gratitudes

of Kleenex or beer cans. We are witnessing a historic decline in 21
the significance of place to human life. We are breeding a new race of nomads, and few suspect quite how massive, wide-spread and significant their migrations are.”
Most of us come late to the realization that our lives are less than a 1000 months long, and that by the time we’re 20 years old we’ve burnt through a quarter of them. The clock is ticking while we’re making up our minds what to do with our lives, and most of us haven’t really decided before the clock has run out, and we drop back lifeless into the primordial ooze..
We don’t have to write a great novel or symphony, invent a new tool or technique, or perform feats of intellect or strength to live meaningful lives. Meaning can come in the simplest of things. It’s well enough being a good person, a good wife or husband, a good mother or father, good son or daughter, good brother or sister, good friend, teacher, neighbour, climber, caregiver, worker, citizen. All we need to be to benefit from the riches of human existence, the gifts of the vast cosmos, and the blessings of the spirit is to be who we are, to be all we can be in the moment of being, and to keep being that through the time and temper of our time on earth.
Sadly, however, there are a lot of obstacles to living a life of meaning: society’s overemphasis on sex and violence; the nihil- istic trash that fills the airwaves; the pervasive predations of ad- vertising; the underplaying of friendship and lack of neighbour- liness; power, beauty, and wealth as the standards of success; drugs and their consequences; lack of meaning-driven media.
Much of human autonomy and freedom is tied up in our ability to make choices. This puts those in search of meaning at odds with those materialistic atheists who say that human free will is an il- lusion. The aim of the good life is the achievement of worthwhile goals: happiness rewards the activity of seeking to achieve, to be or to do, whether or not it succeeds. Life has meaning in being active and in struggle, as struggle is just as much as part of life as anything else.
The individual who lives self-chosen and self-imposed values that answer to a sense of the obligations of humanity and fellow- ship, and appreciation of the value of knowledge, art and nature, is in the best position to find happiness. This is what’s needed to live wisely, to find grace and goodness, to be whole.
■ Finding a Path, Pointing a Way
The Gratitudes series of books is not a tirade against tradition, but they together, and each book individually, ask hard questions about those ideas and institutions that would limit our choices, stifle our growth, and restrict our freedom without a good rea- son, especially when against our free will.
Nor do these books represent or propose a battle between the heaviness of tradition and the daring to create, between the con- forming crowd and the individual shaping his or her own destiny, between the comforts of established and treasured traditions and
INTRODUCING
THE GRATITUDES
Field Guides to Learning and Living Everyday Values