the values Venn diagram
My last post generated an unexpected amount of discussion. To be clear, I don’t think there’s a right way to live, or such a thing as the right “metrics” to measure success in life, or to measure a life by. Defining your values is prerequisite to living them, to making decisions and choosing trade-offs based on them — but I don’t presume to be able to suggest useful definitions for each of you. My friend, Tiffany, astutely points out that it’s the nuances within seemingly mainstream values that we should be paying close attention to — what it means, what it looks like to honor a value like “family” or “success” is going to differ from person from person, informed by variables like our childhoods and our relationships.
Beyond defining our individual values, I think we’re all negotiating a Venn diagram of our own, personal values, and those prescribed by society — ostensibly, wealth-power-physical beauty (which come with some default understanding, but whose definitions can still be variable).
Each of us falls somewhere along the spectrum, between entirely separate value systems and an eclipse of ethos:
There are those who [attempt] to reject societal expectations entirely, and in the majority are those who, with indistinct personal values, take the path of least resistance, likely toward accumulating money and success.
As with most things, I find myself in the middle (as you likely do too).
A fundamental tension of my life is between authenticity, my highest value, and success, society’s highest value (in my opinion). To me, authenticity means living in integrity with myself. Echoing Glennon Doyle in Untamed:
This way of life requires living in integrity: ensuring that my inner self and outer self are integrated. Integrity means having only one self. Dividing into two selves—the shown self and the hidden self—that is brokenness, so I do whatever it takes to stay whole. I do not adjust myself to please the world. I am myself wherever I am, and I let the world adjust.
She elaborates in an interview:
I think integrity has nothing to do with doing the right thing…Integrity is bridging that divide between the two selves, having those two selves be integrated, which is where the word integrity comes from.
At its simplest, when I begin to feel discomfort — an unease that usually emerges in my stomach — I’ve learned to consider where it might be coming from. Often, this happens when I’ve been trying to appease others — whether it’s colleagues or acquaintances — and when I’m worried about whether I’ve been well-received by others. As someone who hopes to one day become a “real writer,” I wonder whether I’ll be able to financially support myself, and what I might have to give up to get there (am I going to have to write Instagram poetry?).
Is it possible to be “successful” while preserving integrity? What compromises in authenticity will I have to make in order to “make it”? The core question, as my friends, Tiff and Jared, have helped me to articulate: how do we make choices that fulfill [some values] while minimizing the cost of those choices on [other values]?
you’ll be dead so who gives a f
In discussing the feeling of elusiveness that my chosen path leaves me with — “what will i have to show for life at the end of it?” — my friend, Julie, responded, “who is the one looking?”
She makes a good point. Who is the one looking? Few people you know now will be alive and well enough to scrutinize your life; even fewer will care to.
The conclusion I find myself coming back to is that it’s ephemeral, this life and all its trimmings. All there is left to do is to be at peace with that. A new poem begins:
These days, I find myself thinking about heartbeats and hummingbirds How every creature has two billion heartbeats How a hummingbird spends all of them at once And maybe it can never be anything more than this — counting heartbeats down to nothing, each one no more unremarkable and no less beautiful than the one before it
Maybe life is just another thing to be experienced; maybe my “goal” is to collect as many experiences as possible in the time that I’m here. Maybe it’s enough to remember, once in a while, that this is water, to think, once in a while, that this is nice. I’ve far from mastered either of these. I’m trying, though, and every day that I remember to — to slow down, look around, savor this song, this mid-day light, this time to myself — is its own victory.
I don't know somehow it seems sufficient to see and hear whatever coming and going is, losing the self to the victory of stones and trees, of bending sandpit lakes, crescent round groves of dwarf pine: -- A.R. Ammons
Or, maybe it’s to seek joy, or to rejoice that we’re in this together, that we’re playing this game, with each other, side by side. Maybe it’s companionship in our journey through the night. A favorite line from my favorite film (at the moment), La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty):
We're all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little...don't you agree?
i’m here to seek beauty
Julie made an observation that felt true to me:
The Great Beauty itself imbued my summer in New York with a new beauty, every walk around Brooklyn accompanied by Vladimir Martynov’s The Beatitudes and a dewy way of looking for beauty.
We’re surrounded by flashes of beauty, however capricious and fleeting. Every time I turn the corner of a hike and come across bright green moss on bark, every time I read or re-read a Mary Oliver poem, every time I feel the golden hour sun, lighting up one plane of my face. I long for these moments of beauty, ordinary and pure.
I’m ready to be proven wrong or right or just to know what it’s like to be past yearning, what it’s like when there’s more present than future Tell me, does it ever stop being amazing? Heartbeats, hummingbirds, bright greens, meteor showers, our own frail lives?
When asked why he never wrote another novel after the success of his first one, the movie’s protagonist, Jep, responds: “I was looking for the great beauty, but, I didn't find it.”
Maybe I won’t find “it” either. I’m not sure there is such a thing as finding it. After all, the emphasis is on the seeking — not predicated on the finding.