This I Believe: Meaning as Self-Creation

My Aunt Jean is a sentimentalist. She finds creative ways to tug at those family ties, to divine emotions that draw us all closer. She compiles old videos. Makes photo albums. Tells stories of my grandparents with all their foibles. (This keeps them alive beyond death, somehow, if but in the hazy Technicolor of memory).

This Christmas she bought us the NPR book This I Believe, in which famous people communicate their deepest values in short essays. Jean asked us all to write our own essays, which she will compile for the Holiday next year. It’s a good idea and I’m happy to participate (but it might as well be blog fodder, too).

This first installment will be “Meaning as Self-Creation.”

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I am an atheist. But for me, the universe isn’t empty without God. It is full of wonder. From the mysterious motion of quarks, to the strange behavior of those carbon-based lifeforms I’ve gotten to know over the years, the universe offers plenty. So where in this whirr of space-dust and self-organization can an atheist find meaning? If no larger-than-life Being has any plan for me, how can I not fall into despair? And if the world is but a grand algorithm determined only by the regularities of nature, why do I even bother?

Because life, I believe, is self-creation. I’ve got this lump of clay (It’s no blank slate to be sure: I have my father’s tendency towards excess, my mother’s analytical nature, the passionate iconoclasm of both; DNA scraps from all my forebears and a million of years of evolutionary forces to reckon with). But as clay of a certain consistency has unique properties, I am still malleable. I think, therefore I become.

I start with a vision of myself. Though subject to versions and revisions, you might say this vision is the man I want to be, shaped by the kind of experiences I hope to have. It is, in part, the pursuit of happiness. Part a disembodied model of my ambition. Part the husband and a father I aspire to be. Part the member of a community. And it is one who, like my embodied self, is also hungry for experiences: spiritual, intellectual and sensate. I move toward that ideal self like an asymptote. All the while I crave novelty. And because I never become that imagined being, my life amounts to a continuous series of self-creation acts. I am like an artist on a journey—shaping himself as he goes. I realize I’ll never become that ideal self. But I’ll still be shaping and molding until the clay hardens, cracks and finally turns to the red dust that settles along the ground beneath rows of Piedmont tobacco. And though I resist, ultimately that’s okay.

To the man who expects to be lead by a Creator to purposes beyond his own design, all this my sound a little nihilistic, if not a little selfish. Perhaps. But this continuous unfolding is neither lonely nor entirely self-serving. I acknowledge my interconnection with those around me. I value the happiness of my friends and family, respect the differences between us, and relish the places of genuine overlap. I try to borrow from the ancient virtues—courage, excellence and moderation (lapsing from time to time on the latter). But when it comes right down to it, my ethics are an internal latticework, not an external list handed down to me by elites with claims to high-up rungs of a golden ladder to Heaven. My moral compass is that which points me in the direction of the man I want to be—a man with friends who love and trust him, a man who is respected by his peers, a man who fights for what he believes in, a man who creates value in the world. And with said value I hope I can afford to purchase the admiration of my son, the love of my wife and the friendship of equals. What more can a man ask for? (Except, one day, to fall as red clay dust along the ground beneath rows of tobacco.)

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[Carly]

That's why I love you.