A New Guidance System for the Second Half of Life
Learning to descend involves a whole set of new skills that requires a whole new perspective. It begins with a new mindset, one that values the present moment as highly as the eventual destination. Instead of constantly striving for our goal, we need to learn to consistently appreciate all we have in the moment. On our Africa adventure, we tried to travel without watches, to remind us of this. When someone asked, “What time is it?” the answer was always, “Now!” And when someone asked, “Where are we?” the answer was always a resounding, “Here!”
In this way, we are never lost; we are always exactly where we need to be—exactly where we are—and always at the right time—now.
This is the authentic and wholehearted experience of adventure that is accessible to us no matter where we are—in Africa or our living room—at all times through our lives. It is the spirit captured in T. S. Eliot’s famous admonition that “old men ought to be explorers.”
Fortunately, that spirit is within us all. Indeed, one might argue that it is encoded into the deepest parts of our being from time immemorial.
Something to live for can be found only by understanding the kind of creatures that humans are: contradictory and complicated, in harmony and constant opposition with ourselves, divided in many ways. We are shaped by individual selection to be selfish creatures who compete for resources—pleasure and savoring the world. And we are shaped by group selection to be tribal creatures who long to lose ourselves in something larger—to save the world.
And so, there cannot be a single answer to the question, “What am I living for?” There must be, in fact, two. This more comprehensive answer to life’s meaning is alluded to in E. B. White’s powerful words:
If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.
But I arise in the morning, torn between a desire to save
the world and a desire to savor the world.
That makes it hard to plan the day.
Happiness comes from within (saving) and from without (savoring). We need the guidance of both to discover something worth living for.
And so, with all due respect to the esteemed Mr. White, we believe that the desire to both save and savor the world makes it easy to plan the day. When we realize that in order to be truly fulfilled we must do both, our choices for daily living begin to unfold naturally. From vital elders who show us the great joy one experiences through generosity to one’s community, we see that it is by saving the world—committing to a cause larger than ourselves—that we savor it—find the everyday joy that having something to live for gives us.
It comes down to a simple truth: individual fulfillment through a way of life that sustains one’s community—in short, savoring and saving the world.
And yet, as simple and obvious as this is, it’s easy to miss. Many of us do; others grasp it ephemerally; all of us seem to have an inkling within us, but it slips away; we get it back; it slips away again.
Popular culture reminds us of this story again and again in books, television, and movies. In the film About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson plays a reasonably successful businessman who loses all sense of meaning and purpose in his life when the roles and people who had supported his sense of self are removed. He retires due to age; his wife dies; his daughter moves away, marries, and begins her separate life; and he is left an empty shell of a person. He sleepwalks through the day, unable to find anything he cares about or considers worth doing.
At the end of the movie, Schmidt realizes that his only meaningful connection is a very tenuous one to an orphan he supports in a Save the Children-like program in Africa. He writes to the child, in a heartfelt and authentic way, and in doing so, seems to connect with a part of himself he was missing. When the child writes back, and Schmidt reads the letter, he weeps as the questions he has avoided come flooding in all at once: Did he ever really live? Did he love? Was he loved? Will he ever really discover something to live for?
Through films like Schmidt, and in countless other works of art that raise similar issues, the eternal question of life’s meaning is surfaced and resurfaced. Our old sense of self is held up to the mirror and a new one waits to be revealed. Such moments are typically confusing, even painful, but they constitute an invitation to hunt the invisible game—to reorient our purpose and priorities. These moments invite us to ask, “How can I both savor and save the world?”
And so, the “invisible game” we are hunting is, in many ways, a hunt for ourselves. In tracking down what we are looking for within us, we find what we are seeking in the world. We gain a true sense of something to live for when our lives align with both saving and savoring the world. Meaning emerges moment-to-moment from this alignment, and so, we can get on with the business of living, even surprised we are still here.