The Lust for Meaning, Joy and Purpose

I got into a long discussion today about my dreams and goals.

After allowing me to fill dreams #1-4 with some variation of taking over the world, it was made clear to me that I'd better stop being so damned obstinate.

I can take a hint if you beat me over the head with it, wave it in front of my face and create a really cool diorama.

I didn't articulate myself all that well at the time. It involves community ... lack of isolation ... lack of pain, blah blah blah. So I spent some time tonight exploring how I got to this point in my life, in terms of life goals & ambitions.

I think the core of it is pure childhood joy. The kind of unabashed joy that children are allowed to feel before they're sent to school (where they're taught how to channel that joy into something more productive ... like memorizing multiplication tables).

When I was young, I loved knowledge and learning. I'd read encyclopedias, ask a million questions, take things apart to see how they worked (with the unfortunate lack of any skill in putting them back together), and generally just absorb knowledge. I particularly loved science.

I lost a lot of this joy after being in school for several years, and kind of drifted along for the next 15 years. Aside from writing in cursive or throwing a football, everything in school came really easily for me. I became bored, got used to everything being easy, and learned to follow the path of least resistance. I just kind of did what I was expected to do (more or less), and set my goals by established societal norms (go to college, get a house in the suburbs, woo a cute girl who fits into the same mold). But externally reified goals didn't really stir the soul.

I did finally shake a lot of the cobwebs out of my head in my early 20s, and recaptured that sense of childhood joy for a little while ... I was going to change majors and be a scientist :) This was going to be very difficult, requiring lots of advanced math ... but the thing is, when you have that driving joyful vision in your heart the challenges aren't all that important. I was going to be a scientist and take apart the universe piece by piece until I understood it all :)

(It would be someone else's job to put it back together again!)

Of course, developing fullblown MCS and being bedridden with a functional IQ of 30 for a year kind of put a damper on that idea.

When I was teaching at an alternative high school, I began reading a lot of alternative educational literature. I jumped quickly from Deborah Meyer, to John Dewey, to Ted Sizer, to Alfie Kohn ... and finally to John Taylor Gatto. The Underground History of American Education was one of the three most influential books in my life, in the sense that it helped to drag my liberal tendencies towards anarchism. We absorbed this knowledge and started to plan some really interesting things for the next school year. I was excited!

Well, the fates had different things in mind of course ... I lost my job over disability discrimination and had to find a new career (schools are pretty damned toxic). I continued reading and researching, becoming enamored with natural building techniques and low impact living. This knowledge fulfilled my intellectual quota, but didn't connect with me on a really deep level.

It wasn't until a few years later, when I learned about active ecovillages in the country and started investigating them that I recaptured that sense of wonder and awe. It wasn't just the simple living (and a rejection of the complex, toxic shit that had poisoned me) ... the closeness to the natural world ... or even the self-sufficiency. It was the sense of community, a group of people who had very little to do with our toxic culture on a daily basis. This part is really the key to what attracted me to ecovillages and (some) intentional communities. The people who lived in them had their primary allegiance to the land, to the patterns of nature on the land, and to the other people on that same plot of land. They didn't spend all day in a toxic workplace, and didn't see their home as some sort of recreational tool.

This concept grabbed me immediately, and I found a way to visit a cool ecovillage two states away.

Of course, this didn't work out either. I managed to blow out a tire in my car, get burned rubber all over most of my safe linens and clothing, and was reacting to the tiniest toxic insult at the ecovillage ... and then when I got home my only safe washing machine broke. This set me way, way back and precipitated operation "get the hell out of the city". I had to give up on an engaging dream again, and a part of me kind of died inside. (I've been trying to make it work in isolation, but it's a hollow alternative).

Now that I'm in a more stable position in my life (in terms of health) and am working on safe portable housing, I should soon be in a position to pursue this dream again. This is still the most engaging thing I can imagine doing with my life -- it simply feels right on every level. I felt palpable excitement and joy when discussing it with a friend yesterday; the little curious kid in me was waking up again.

So what's the point of this story? :)

What I'm trying to articulate is pretty simple: I believe that there's a lust for meaning, joy and purpose inside all of us that is an integral part of what it means to be human. Our culture likes to beat it out of us, but it's still there. When you can find this joy inside of yourself, and begin listening to it, then everything else becomes a hell of a lot easier.

It may mean pounding a lot of square pegs into round holes, and a lot of hard work ... because you're probably going to be going against the grain. But when you can find the dream that gives you joy and pursue that unabashedly, you may find that the difficulty doesn't really matter because you're too busy having fun to notice.