Topic #32

“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start”

– Charles Bukowski

If You Do Nothing You May As Well Just Die

***Each week we’ll alternate as devil’s advocate. The opinions you read may not necessarily be our actual thoughts, just a deliberate ploy in our eternal debate with one another.***

A shrink once told me that in order to be happy a person needs to have two things in life: Meaning and Purpose. Of course, telling a person that the key to their emergence from the horrid cesspool of sorrow is contained in four simple syllables may at first seem cruelly irresponsible. In fact, neither of these is easy to find or hold on to, so one isn’t supposed to feel bad that they haven’t got there yet. These two words may appear to be the same vaguely inspiring concept printed onto one of those motivational posters, but they deal with two very different questions. Purpose is about what you do, while Meaning is about why you do it.

We are not put here on Earth to fart around, we are put on this Earth to put our finger prints all over it and mould our world, even if only a corner of it, into something it might not have been if we hadn’t touched it. I would have been dead a long time ago if I truly believed that my only reason for existing was to drift around, lost in the random exquisiteness of it all. Purpose is what gets a person out of bed every morning. For some, it is found in earning loads of cash money to spend frivolously, or developing policies for a company or a country, or defending the rights of endangered animals, or parenthood, for others still it is stuffing their head with learning, for me it is teaching. I know what you’re thinking. Plenty of people have a reason to wake up (ie a job) and they are still unhappy. They are on autopilot: They have to get up because if they don’t the bills don’t get paid, their parents will be disappointed, their partner will leave them, their friends will think they’re a loser and they won’t be able to afford a holiday to get them away from what’s making them get up every morning.

I lie in bed some mornings and want to stay curled up because I’m tired, and it’s warm and I have a list of books I want to read. But if I don’t get up, the kids will be cranky they had a sub teacher, the lesson will be a crummy worksheet for the sake of the teacher tasked with wrangling my class, that student who asked to see me at lunch will have to reschedule. And that’s where Purpose and Meaning become intertwined. What you do will get you so far, after that it’s easy to get lost because we are weary and farting around is easy, couches are comfy. The next step is Meaning. Why are you doing it? To be happy we need to have an intrinsic belief that our world would be worse off if we didn’t get out of bed.

In order to have a chance of tapping into that apparent impossibility, Happiness, we have to know why it is important that we don’t just fart around. We have to know why it’s important for us to act, as well as who and what would be disadvantaged if we didn’t. I am one of the few people I know who truly loves their job. I am not talking about enjoying my job, or it being fun. Hell no. I am always fighting fatigue, constantly scrawling more things on my to-do list than I am crossing off, always taking deep breaths and counting to ten. It is often far from enjoyable. I am talking about deep down, unconditionally, knot in my gut when I imagine not having it in my life, willing to sacrifice endless sleep and spare time to throw my entire self into it. The love isn’t because my job is more important than someone else’s job. I know plenty of people who do not feel the way I do about teaching. It’s because I have found the meaning. I know why I’m doing it. I’ve found it in a kid who asks to sit silently beside me at lunchtime, so they are safe from ‘the others’, and a once tearful parent whose child is heading down a dangerous track. I’ve found it in a silly boy who made the choice to become a young man this year, and a girl who graduated top of her English class after yelling in my face, years ago, that she would be dropping out. I am not being arrogant when I say that these people’s lives would not be the same if I had not been in them. My actions, my words, have made a difference in my small corner of the world. Though they are just small changes in a small section of a small planet in a huge universe, they are still changes, and they mean something.

Thank goodness I haven’t just been farting around.