Love in the Time of Intolerance Part III

Love in the Time of Intolerance:  Everything is Meaningless

I’m a MEANINGFULNESS junkie. The most important book I’ve ever read is “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl.  His famous quote, "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom."  is my e-mail signature.  The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s book, “Toward a Meaningful Life” was one of the main reasons I stayed in the Chabad cult for as long as I did.   Everything HAS to have meaning or I disengage, or worse, don’t connect at all. 

My line each time I return from Israel to LA is I’m going from meaningful to meaningless.  Although I’m born and raised here, in fact, I’m a second generation Angeleno, I’ve never felt this is HOME – I’ve been longing for where that connection, that feeling I belong, in the most ancient of ways.   The place I can go deep because I AM deep.  I’m not sure why or what the cause is for my lack of respect for LALA LAND, but I suspect it has to do with the transitory nature of the City.  The old joke that if you’ve just arrived but written a screenplay or gone on an audition while waiting tables, you qualify as a LA Native.  I connect much more where there is a strong sense of the history that I carry in my genes, or perhaps in my past lives where walking the cobblestone streets of Boston, or Paris, and that indescribable feeling of my DNA settling the first time I set foot on the ground in Nairobi, on the Terra Firma of the Mother Continent.  And of course, most powerfully in Israel, where EVERYTHING MEANS SOMETHING, and nothing just exists.  At least that’s the marketing campaign.

But maybe I’m wrong about LA.  Meaning is, after all, subjective.  So, why don’t I ascribe meaning to living in Los Angeles?  Surprisingly, I just realized this is the first time I am even asking myself this question, and the answer is I honestly don’t know.  My line to myself when I am out of sorts, which is a good deal of the time, is that “I can’t find a place for myself.”  These days it’s even harder for me to curl up with a book, no matter the comfy reading nooks I have in my home.  But is this because living in LA has no meaning and if I were somewhere else, I would naturally just be able to “just be”?  Carefree yet grounded and solid with meaningfulness oozing from my every pore?

Hell if I know.  It is true that I suck at small talk.  Girl talk bores the shit out of me.  Gossip irritates me.  I can’t “just hang.”  It’s why, I tell myself, I hate dating.  Hiding behind demanding meaningfulness has allowed me to judge and assume and not “get out there”.  To stay safe and not risk.  Oy. 

For some reason, these lyrics from “The Boxer” by Simon and Garfunkel just ran through my mind:

“In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of ev'ry glove that laid him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains….”

I’ve not been valuing down time. I’ve not been valuing laughter.  I’ve not allowed myself fun.  I don’t live in the moment.  I’m dragged down by my skewed addiction to “meaningful”.

Epiphany number one literally just now:  I’ve been conflating meaningless with self-care.  A good friend has been in more war zones and battlefields and hellholes than most civilians.  As the Executive Director for Doctors Without Borders in LA, and now a leader in global prison reform she’s a frequent flyer into Hell:  famines, genocides, war zones, rape camps, all of it.  She’s selfless and driven and brilliant.  Her answer when I asked her how she deals with what she sees and does:  Mid-century Scandinavian furniture – after all, she’s Swedish.  She scours thrift shops, old furniture stores, and loves finding that odd end table or something to place next to her reading nook.  It keeps her sane.

I have not allowed myself to have a meaningless pressure valve.  I need one now more than ever. The truth is I’ve never valued myself enough to cherish meaninglessness.  Epiphany number two: unless I ascribed meaning to everything than I did not have meaning.  My self-worth is strangle-strength bound to the meaning I give to everything outside me.

Of course, my subconscious, or Higher Self has been leading me to this realization all along.  It’s no accident that my favorite writer is Milan Kundera and two of my favorite novels of his are “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” and “Immortality” and of all the Hasidic Masters distilling ancient Jewish wisdom, my heart and soul are soothed by the teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who’s  central message is to never lose hope and to find joy and cause for happiness in everything that happens to you.  

Epiphany number three:  I have to believe I am worthy of moments of joy, of beauty, of awe and of love.  It’s crucial for me to consciously curate those moments:  those stand-alone experiences that are not tied to anything “larger”, have no baggage or agenda or weight of the world attached.

Epiphany number four:  Everything is meaningful.  Even the things that are not.