The Meaning of Life

A couple of years ago I had a lunch conversation with a friend that still sticks with me. We were eating meatloaf sandwiches at the Airport Café, a few minutes from the shop where we both worked and we were talking about The Hottie, a woman he’d dated for a few weeks now. He didn’t even bother to tell me her name because he assumed she was too good for him and that, when she realized this, her name would disappear anyway, right along with her.

A few months earlier he’d bought a Porsche. He'd found it on craigslist.org and financed it with eLoans.com. They FedEx’ed him a check. He credited that car with winning him his presumed-doomed Hottie relationship, and he was telling me they’d driven it down to Napa for a four-day weekend. He was routinely taking her to $400 dinners, buying $100 wines, $300 Coach bags … swimming pools, movie stars. And I asked him during that lunch whether all of this was sustainable. He said, “I don’t know. I doubt it.” But of course the answer had to be, “No.”

Right away, though, I wondered why I would ask such a stupid question. Was I just trying to knock him down? As somebody who professes to have practiced a little Buddhism, where do I come off asking if something is sustainable? So I apologized for being a killjoy.

He said, “No, I honestly don’t know how far I’m willing to take this thing if she doesn’t hurry up and dump me. I’ve actually thought about borrowing against my house.”

I said, “Jesus, I thought I was a romantic. What ever happened to just jumping off a cliff?”

“That’s after she dumps me.”

I’ve always tried to find meaning in life through relationships with other people and through projects. I don’t believe in God, but I do see value in service and sacrifice, and certainly in love. The connectedness that can come from a good conversation or from rigging up a good system is, for me, where all the poetry is. I’m excited by the idea of Great Things, but I’m also very, very pleased when I see a really good birdhouse. So here was my buddy, eating cold meatloaf, talking about burning through everything he had and calling it a candlelight dinner.

I thought: is it more beautiful to recklessly risk everything for love, or to cultivate wisdom and open-hearted exchange? Or is this like asking whether Spring blossoms are superior to Fall foliage?

On Memorial Day, and knowing only one person directly involved in a war, I think this: for those swallowed up by something so big as war, may they feel that life is rich.

Jude with Isaiah, Kailey, and Sammy,
whose Daddy is in Iraq.

And should I then presume?
And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

From “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
T.S. Eliot