As an interesting exercise, I recently asked a group I meet with to come up with a new decade intention—sort of like a New Year's resolution with a significantly longer time span. I couldn't fairly ask others to consider this without looking at this for myself. I'm not particular fond of resolutions, since I see persons as part of an ongoing process. And to break up the intentions of our life's arc or teleology into discreet calendar years seems a bit absurd. Yet, there may merit in taking inventory of where we are in the moment, so we can become the people we were meant to be for eternity.
I've distilled some recent preoccupations around this “triple h” phrase of hope, humor, and homing in that I'd like to try to engage with as a practice over the next decade. I could have probably said these things mattered to me in my younger years, but they had a different flavor—often operating at a lower octave as the preoccupations of youth never allowed me to deepen their significance. Hope for me as a younger man, would have led me to dreams around achievements in career and relationships. My ideas around humor would have been limited to being gratified by satire or irony at another's expense. And if I was homing in on anything, it was just sharpening some skills to get affirmation or approval from others.
And if these concepts have a different meaning to me now, and going forward, I can truly thank that cliché of a good old fashion mid-life crisis. The things that worked in the past to preoccupy our deeper soul level wounds, don't work so well when you see time caving in on one's youthful zeal. We can be overcome by an existential dread and anguish, novel enthusiasm can begin to wane, and we can sense fractures in belief systems and passions that once gave us an identity. But with this dissonance, we can also feel a calling to go deeper while going through it. It's as if there is an invitation to change through the suffering, and not become static in one's being.
Looking at hope, its primary enemy is despair. Despair becomes this insidious posture that nothing will change, and that somehow God made things this way. It is one that I can feel creeping in often; where I can see my karmic ideas around my circumstances were meant to be. But looking at this from a different vantage point, I can see how prideful this is. Whatever despair I may feel is not God trying to crush me, but may actually be an avenue to higher virtue and a deeper way of being. In Catholic theology, hope is one of the three transcendental virtues, along with faith and love. Hope is grounded in faith meaning we need this hope to come from someplace beyond ourselves, and in time, it can lead us to a deeper love where our limited selves have been used up for some greater embrace. Whatever finite things we hope for will always be ephemeral, and eventually leave us unsatiated by a deeper longing. Moreover, hope may not be getting the things we want, but ultimately may need. As Václav Havel said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
Humor is a quality and creative endeavor I admire in and with others. I recall an ex-girlfriend mentioned that she had a friend who couldn't decide whether to join a monastery or become a stand-up comedian. While I found the juxtaposition amusing, I also didn't see these choices as that far apart. I often can learn just as much about human nature from watching an act by Bill Burr or Dave Chappelle as listening to a monk's dharma. Moreover, the levity of good comedy lightens us up, and in the laughter we can feel an authentic moment of release that can bring us closer to God. While there is certainly a dark side to it, I still see that aspect as a wholesome revealing. It calls us to look within, and not take ourselves so seriously. It places light on the shadows of our humanity, and to take inventory of where these fallibilities reside in us. Life may be a human tragedy from one level, but can also be seen as a divine comedy from another. Humor can be a vehicle that gives us some distance from our adversities, bring us in to deeper communion with others in friendship, and draw us closer to a mysterious presence in our laughter.
I've probably been homing in on an unlimited longing for most of my life. When I was in my early twenties, I confronted my father after he attempted to give me life advice that there had to be more to life than work, family, and money. He said to me bluntly, “there isn't!” A dread overcame me, but there was still a part of me that wasn't buying it. I had to flail around for a while before I found some reliable fingers that were pointing towards that “more.” Once I got a taste, I knew that to be at home in life, I would need to home in on Truth. This became my quest, and while it still fires with many cylinders, I am more aware of a spiritual dryness that still overcomes me. Part of this has resulted with too many preoccupations that lack significance and take me away from a deeper yearning. I recall reading Mark Manson's The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck a couple years back. His variation on a Buddhist insight is not that we should say f--- it to life, but f--- it to the things that don't matter in life. Sometimes this requires courage as it requires going against the cultural grain. Other times, it's just a matter of having some will to avoid the vices of unhealthy escapism and narcissistic gratification. Moreover, I feel it has to be a real surrender and repentance. As I get older, the stakes get higher and I can no longer play the god of my life. I need to give over to the mystery, and allow myself to be guided as to what I am to become.
The practice of hope sustains me when I fail at this homing in, and humor gives me permission to not take myself so serious in the process. I can only home in on the mystery when I remain vulnerable to life and fall in to the love that truly guides me; and while this may be a decade long intention on my part, there will always be a place of unknowingness as to how this unfolds beyond whatever I may intend.