Anam Cara

Longing Keeps Your Sense of Life Kindled

The value of such openness is that it permits a crucial distance between you and the activity of your life in the world. It keeps a certain inner solitude clear, so that you remain aware of a primordial longing of life rising in you. Longing in this sense is not a search for gratification or pleasure. This longing is the primal presence of your own vitality. It is the sense of life in you which makes you feel alive. Psychology, philosophy, or religion rarely refer to the “sense of life.” They concern themselves with the outer meaning of the world, the inner meaning of the soul, and the threshold where the two meet. This search for meaning is as ancient as the awakening of the first question; it is as new and urgent as the question that is troubling you now. Without a sense of meaning, life becomes absurd and surrealistic. In our times Camus, Sartre, Beckett, and Kafka have explored the possibilities and consequences of taking any human action amid the unpredictable chaos of life.

When your sense of meaning collapses or is violated, it becomes exceptionally difficult to remain creative or even to continue believing in anything. In the Siberian Gulag, prisoners were forced victims of absurdity. They were forced to do tasks that involved hard labour in the freezing cold. Regardless of how minimal and slight a task might be, the human mind always desires that the task have some significance. The Gulag prisoners were often forced to move hundreds of tons of stones from a pile to another location some miles away. Each day, in the freezing cold, each prisoner filled his wheelbarrow and slowly wheeled barrow after barrow of rock to the other location. You can imagine their sense of satisfaction as over the weeks the new rock pile began to grow from the transported stone. Every stone was earned. On the very day that all the stones were transferred, the guards made the prisoners begin to bring the stones back again to reconstruct the original pile in the same place. This forced absurdity would eat into the coherence and break the secret belonging of any mind.