Our quest for meaning, though often unacknowledged, is what secretly sustains our passion and guides our instinct and action. Our need to find meaning is urged upon us by our sense of life. Normally, when we look at people, whether at work, on the street, or in our homes, we inevitably think of them in practical terms. We experience other people very concretely. We notice the way they look, the role they play, the clothes they wear, the habits they have, and especially the styles of their personalities.
Yet when you distance yourself from the particularities of individual lives, you begin to realize that no human person is here on earth accidentally or neutrally. Each person is a living world of longing. You are here not simply because you were sent here. You are here because you long to be here. A person is an incarnation of longing. Behind your image, role, personality, and deeper than your thoughts, there is a pulse of desire that sustains you in the world. All your thoughts, feelings, and actions arise from a secret source within you which desires life. This is where your sense of life is rooted. Your sense of life expresses itself in your convictions, intentions, and passions; it precedes them. Your sense of life is pre-reflective, yet passionate and powerful. This secret presence of longing helps you endure the routine of the daily round; it emerges strongly when difficulty entangles you, or when suffering strips away your networks of connection with the world. Your sense of life is not something you can invent or force with your mind. It is the wisdom of your clay and is eternally acquainted with awakening. As you discover the faithfulness of life within you, your sense of life transfigures your fear and assures you that you are more deeply rooted than you realize. It frees you for the adventure of solitude.
Each one of us is alone in the world. It takes great courage to meet the full force of your aloneness. Most of the activity in society is subconsciously designed to quell the voice crying in the wilderness within you. The mystic Thomas à Kempis said that when you go out into the world, you return having lost some of yourself. Until you learn to inhabit your aloneness, the lonely distraction and noise of society will seduce you into false belonging, with which you will only become empty and weary. When you face your aloneness, something begins to happen. Gradually, the sense of bleakness changes into a sense of true belonging. This is a slow and open-ended transition but it is utterly vital in order to come into rhythm with your own individuality. In a sense this is the endless task of finding your true home within your life. It is not narcissistic, for as soon as you rest in the house of your own heart, doors and windows begin to open outwards to the world. No longer on the run from your aloneness, your connections with others become real and creative. You no longer need to covertly scrape affirmation from others or from projects outside yourself. This is slow work; it takes years to bring your mind home.
The human mind is an amazing gift. It delights in the activity of exploring, gathering, and relating things. Whereas stones or trees never seem bothered by their particular uniqueness, each human mind is powerfully conscious of its own difference; it has an intimate and unbreakable relationship with its own difference. This is what makes human individuality journey out of itself to explore and engage others; but it is also what makes each of us so deeply aware of our aloneness. In contrast to the rest of Nature, the human mind makes us feel alone, aware of the distances we will never be able to cross. The mind cannot resist exploration, because it always sees the world mirrored in itself. The huge longing of the human mind is to discover ever larger shelters of belonging.
