He was a young doctor, in his late 20s. I am close to 70. He was showing me around his town when he turned to me and asked, at my age, what advice would I give to someone his age? I paused for a while. I don’t usually get asked this. (Wonder why?) And I usually hesitate to answer a question like this because I know that each life is unique and whatever I have learned in my life may not be relevant to someone else. I shared the reasons for my hesitation with him. But his question still hung in the air.
I said that there is no single magic-bullet answer for life but there are a few things that should be in place for life to be meaningful. Those of you who have been following this column will know how much I have appreciated The Power of Meaning (1) by Emily Esfahani Smith. So, I said we all need love. We are relational beings and it is not good for people to be alone. Every day there are new statistics of the damage of living life with no meaningful social connections. Doctors are particularly busy. So we need to intentionally invest time to nurture key relationships in our lives — family, friends, members of our faith community, etc.
Next, our lives must have purpose. Every morning we wake up and we know we can value add to this world by doing that which makes sense of our abilities, our burdens, and the “hinge moments” that define our lives. It would seem that it should be simple for a doctor to know his life’s purpose. But that sense of calling may be blunted by exhaustion or seduced by the temptations of the pursuit of money and fame. The juggling of vocation and other duties is also complex but, at the heart of it all, there must be the knowledge that who I am and what I do count.
Third, we need to develop resilience. Living in a fallen world, we do not know what pain and tragedy may enter our lives. We may make horrible mistakes that have costly consequences. And bad things happen to both good and bad people. Maybe we might contract a life-threatening disease … or a loved one dies from one. There are levels of pain we do not know exist until we experience them. While a few of us may go through life relatively free of pain, most of us will, sooner or later, experience serious pain. We need to know how to find healing and meaning in our pain and failures. This is part of Life 101 but few talk about it.
Next, we need to find some meaning for death. Even if our lives are relatively pain free, we all face the inevitability and mystery of death. All of us want our final days to be pain free but what about death itself? Is it really the end of everything? This feels like a terrible waste since each year we live, we acquire (hopefully) more wisdom and it would really be a horrible joke if in the end it is all for nothing. Is the Christian story true? Did this Jesus person really rise again from the dead and now offers life beyond the grave to those who believe in Him? One may think that 27 is too young an age to be thinking about death. But one of my best friends died in a car accident in his second year of university.
Fifth, is the God question. Is there God? If yes, what is He like? There was a time when folks thought that when science could answer most of the questions of life, we would no longer need a god hypothesis. Well, we have discovered that science cannot answer all the questions of life. Yes, science can answer many questions now, but there continues to be a human hunger for transcendence. There is a resurgence of interest in all the main religions, and a hunger for the spiritual that pervades popular media. Did God really make an appearance in history in the person of Jesus? If yes, is our hunger for God met in a relationship with Him?
Love, purpose, resilience, the answer to the reality of death, and a hunger for transcendence. If we have these five things in place in our lives, we have a good chance of living a life of meaning. We may need more than these five things, but I don’t think we can do away with any of them. The young doctor was a Christian and we both looked to the Bible for our answers. I suspect we will each have to revisit these concerns many times in our lives. I hope that sharing these five elements with my new friend will help him as he looks at the life ahead of him, even as I meditate on them as I look back on my life.
(1) New York, NY: Crown Publications, 2017.