I think about the meaning of life a lot, and what the point of building a career, investing wisely, following laws and living morally is. I have a hard time figuring it out, let alone articulating it, but the book I’m reading does a better job. Breakfast with Buddha, by Roland Merullo, is a novel about a middle-aged man driving from Manhattan to North Dakota to settle his deceased parents’ estate with (randomly) a guru from eastern Europe. He goes on a lot of tangents about meditation, spirituality, materialism, success, etc… He often riffs about food and Hershey and funny stuff too! I share this question with him:
“I have moments–watching wife and babysitter punch each other on daytime TV, or reading about two-year-olds left alone by crack-addicted moms, or hearing radio loudmouths fomenting hatred, or seeing thirty thousand dollars spent on our neighbors’ daughters’ sweet-sixteen parties while my sister’s friends in Paterson work for five dollars an hour–when I wonder if we have, in fact, started in on a moral decline that will end with our extinction, the flag in tatters run down the pole for the final time, the Great American Experiment lying in pieces like a beautiful broken vase, weakened from within and then smashed from without.”
I also wonder if we are speeding inevitably toward our demise, especially in assessing our nonchalance toward the potential cataclysm of climate change. And I think capitalism truly is the Great American Experiment, how we justify gross inequality, lack of health care, wars, and environmental crimes in the name of profit.
This bit on religion (another subject I wrestle with) also resonated:
“But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.”
Thoughtfully and unpretentiously put.
