Bringing Life To Completion

We generally live on a practical, surface level with the sense of self--and of life --that we develop as we learn to navigate our everyday world. The work of this everyday self is fundamental to becoming who we are, participating in our world, and learning what makes life worthwhile. As fundamental as these endeavors are, running though them are times when life urges us toward something more. First of all, whatever sense of well-being we achieve in our everyday states of mind also brings its discontents. We'd like to think of these nagging feelings as practical problems that we can address through effort, knowledge and ability. And, of course, in part they are just that. But, at times, we also feel a discontent that the everyday self is out of its depth in trying to deal with. We also find the work of our everyday self insufficient because, as it creates our concrete sense of being someone, we are then confronted with the impermanence of what it has created and it again comes up short in trying to deal with this. So, the everyday state of existence is not enough. Stirring within us is a sense that we are something more and can make something more of life. We can think of as our deeper or spiritual self. It is in engaging life as this deeper self that we can come to experience an answer to our discontents and our fears about life's transience and final end. We do this not by turning away from the life of our everyday self but by transforming it, taking what we achieve there and giving it greater meaning. As Carl Jung expressed it, “I have learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life can never be solved but only outgrown.” Some have referred to such transforming experience as “perceiving the miraculous in the ordinary.” For the time being we are taken beyond the limits and ambiguities, the compromises and times of self-centeredness, of the everyday. We engage life with a whole heart because we unite the surface and deeper levels of our being. We bring together our practical concerns and our quest for a life of ultimate meaning. Let's think of these as times of transcendence --a standing beyond the ordinary limits of our awareness and action, and coming to a place where life surges in us toward a feeling of completion. We find the key to dying well, I am proposing, by bringing memorable moments of life together in a way that touches something deeper in us than our fear of death --a sense that our struggle to live the meaning of being human has been touched by a feeling of an ultimate worth and goodness to it all. Dying well rests on continuing this feeling into our final days. But, as we have noted, this is likely to be a time of increasing diminishment of our physical and mental functioning that will make it harder to experience a sense of meaning and transcendence. Knowing this, we may fear that this final stage will be little more than a grim addendum to our life story, rather than an important chapter in bringing it to completion. We may well ask whether, even with the best of luck, we will not live this time with a diminished sense of the good of life and of our significance as persons --a time when we are likely to become less and less capable of doing so many of the things that we have relied on for a sense of meaning and worth? Will it not reduce us to clinging to left over bits and pieces of the good we once found in life, honoring ourselves --and feeling ourselves honored--largely for the person we were, and reflecting on a life whose story seems to have been set by what we have already made of it? We hear in these fears the voice of our old friend, the everyday self. When we are in this state of mind, we think of meaning and personal identity as resting on experiences of vitality and achievement, of being in control and building a meaningful future. But these experiences are less and less part of life's final chapter. The more our everyday self is left to its own understanding, the more it will see this change as taking away everything that gives life point. We can best come to terms with this by building on an earlier discussion. If we are to prepare ourselves to continue the unfolding of meaning and transcendence into our final days, we need to expand the horizons of our experience beyond those of our everyday self. This is difficult for us because, while some of these currents lift us into moments of transcendent meaning, others subject us to a sense of the temporary nature of everything and the final ending that is death. But each of these sides of our experience is part of the very nature of life, its never-ceasing change and possibility. Life does not make possible the one without the other. We confront the paradox, then, that we open ourselves to life's greatest gifts only by also opening ourselves to its darker sides. Learning to live with this larger perspective can help us to find ways of keeping our sense of self and appreciation of life in tact when everyday meanings bring disappointment or are damaged or lost. Much is likely to depend on learning, at these times, to bring our deeper self into the center of our experience. This can be especially important in our final days when we can seek to keep physical and mental diminishments at the periphery of our awareness by giving greater strength and prominence to our remaining powers, somewhat like the way those suffering impairment of sight or hearing make greater use of other senses. This possible enhancement of one's remaining powers may very well account for some of the richness of being that many have experienced at life's end.