My Craving, Material, Transcendent Soul

I went to the neighborhood Portillo’s this weekend. It was a busy Saturday afternoon. Almost all the parking spaces were taken. The line of cars waiting at the drive-through wrapped around the building. Inside, the tables were teeming with hungry folks, and there was a ravenous yet convivial energy. While waiting for my order, I had a couple of minutes to look around. There had to be at least 20 people working, of just about every age, size, and ethnic group you could imagine. Each employee was busy at his or her own task, and the place was humming. Watching them make all these meals, the clockwork yet polite efficiency with which they went about feeding and pleasing literally hundreds of customers, filled me with the kind of spontaneous joy that I imagine some people get when they stumble upon a beautiful vista while hiking in the mountains.

John Gray famously opined: “Work on the world is useless; work on the self is not.” Call me the Anti-John Gray. Work in the world is the one thing that is not useless. Now, by work I don’t necessarily mean what we are employed to do. By work, I mean any activity where you are using your energy to accomplish something. But most of the time, for most of us, that work is something that we do while we are on the job. Even if that job is something as seemingly mundane as flipping a burger.

Back in grad school, I spent a long weekend in a cabin up near Sleeping Bear Dunes, on the coast of Lake Michigan, with a bunch of friends from the college radio station where I DJ’d. Some hippy chick from California had come along with us. Besides being pretentious and dull, she suffered from the unpardonable sin of being not at all hot. After a while, she got frustrated with our company. We ate tons of red meat. None of us wanted to sit around the fire and have late-night bull sessions where we bared our deepest secrets. And not one of us played the acoustic guitar. Towards the end of the weekend, she blurted out: “I’ve never been with a less spiritual bunch of people in my life.” I consider it one of the greatest, unsolicited compliments that I’ve ever received, even if I was sharing this honor with a dozen others.

I know that, despite their rejection of organized religion, there is this urge to be “spiritual” among many of my peers, this belief that standing outside on a starry night and feeling close to the vast universe around us is a meaningful act. And, on a superficial level, maybe it is, at least to the person who is feeling it. But this thought, on its own, has no resonance. Without some observable action in the physical world, it is meaningless, its only function being to reassure that individual mind it has value, a suicide prevention device preprogrammed into the neural networks of our brains that keeps the organism alive but otherwise serves little purpose.

While we may not be only our outward interactions with the world, it is a good way to judge ourselves. You want to “know” what you are like? Don’t look “deep inside yourself.” That will tell you nothing, at least nothing relevant to the question at hand. Look outside yourself, at what you have accomplished, at how you make others act and feel. That will tell you what you need to know.

There is a flipside to this idea, one that gives it context, and that is that the person with a job, no matter how menial, is almost assuredly doing more to benefit the universe than the most enlightened hippy living out in some teepee, shitting in the woods and thinking his deep thoughts. The modern world is a beautiful thing. If one of our hunter-gathering forebears stumbled into our lives, they would think we were gods. We can fly. We can tell time. We can communicate complex ideas to one another, and these thoughts can be shared across the globe in the blink of an eye. At least compared with the stunted existence of our ancestors, we seemingly live forever.

Modern life is a miracle. Sure, people still suffer. But as a whole, we suffer a lot less than our ancestors did, particularly from the elemental plagues, such as starvation and disease. And for most of us, at least in the developed world, there are such transcendent joys, be they musical, narrative, intellectual, culinary, or personal, and most of our lives extend so close to their natural limits (which a futurist once told me is 85 +/- 7 on a bell curve) that we are within shouting range of that heaven on earth promised to us in the Bible.

Even if life does not progress, if the human race is never fully enlightened, assuming some great calamity befalls us, and we crawl back into the primordial ooze from which we sprang, this particular life, here and now, is a pretty brilliant one. So either our civilization is but a precursor to an enlightened age, one where the wolf lays down with the lamb, and we all eat milk and honey, or it is not, and things eventually collapse, which means that we, right now, are the glorious apex of a tortured but noble species, one that will be praised and lamented amongst the spheres. In either case, work hard my friends, and enjoy this life. Because we are something special.