they caught on the street. I wanted to gather everyone else's expectations and use them as fuel for a trash-can fire that would warm our odd little threesome.
Rich and Jim were my first friends in NYC, and after several months and hundreds of heart-opening conversations, I trusted them implicitly. One cold, bitter night as I was leaving the café, I heard Rich tell Jim the shelter was full. They'd put in yet another twelve-hour workday, and now they'd need to cuddle on a park bench and hope to avoid frostbite, pneumonia, and police harassment. My mouth knew what this meant before my brain formulated a thought: “I have some room,” I said aloud. By some I meant a three-by-three patch of floor, the only extra space, right next to my bed.
I knew I hardly knew them, but that same logic hadn't seemed to stop me from being alone with myself. For two weeks they shared my shoebox room, squished together on an air mattress like two oversize, mismatched spoons. They'd leave early in the morning, head to their storage space for clothes, and then go to the café to work on a deal. They were always “so close” to closing a deal. One day, after multiple late-payment warnings, their servers went down. All they'd sacrificed, all the cold nights they'd spent on the street, all the work they'd put in—gone, leaving them with nothing to show for their loyalty to possibility.
And I still had nothing but the hope of seeing them succeed. All the space another person might fill with her own ambition I overflowed with voyeuristic support for Rich and Jim. If I couldn't champion their comeback story and ride their rags-to-riches coattails as the one who believed in them, what I feared was reality would actually be true: my life meant nothing because I was doing nothing. With far more desperation than I registered, I pulled out my credit card and fronted them $700. They had to keep going. I had to hold on to their dream.
If my life were a movie, the next part would be the montage that's often referred to as “fun and games” in the film industry. You'd see them high-fiving at the computer as business appears to increase exponentially. You'd catch a glimpse of us doing a three-way Laverne &Shirley schlemiel-schlimazel in unified elation over everything that's going right. As a viewer, you'd know I made the right choice—that my risk paid off, and they were well on their way to creating a money-making, history-breaking venture. And then the impact would hit as strong as a frozen anvil to the face when you saw me standing alone in my room, the $100 in cash I kept hidden under my bed gone, and Rich and Jim no more than the dirty air mattress they popped before they left.
In one fell swoop, I lost my only friends and the illusion that I was living a life that meant something. How could I have been so naïve and pathetic? In a prolonged dramatic gesture, I walked over to the mirror, stared deeply into my empty eyes—murmuring that I was stupid, hopeless, and worthless—and then, putting all my anger into a forceful grab, shattered the mirror against the floor, the shards scattering all along the deflated bed.
I would sooner have slumped there forever, alone with shame and sorrow, than risk going into the world and proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that I meant nothing. Not that my life meant nothing—that I did. If you opened the dictionary to Lori Deschene, I feared, you'd wonder how a single piece of paper could express such a putrid-smelling, soul-sucking emptiness.
When I was younger, I used to say words repeatedly to wear them down, a lot like tossing food in the blender and completely forgetting it had once been a solid item. I'd start while I was coloring or doing some other solitary activity, murmuring, “Refrigerator. Refrigerator. Refriii-igeeeeraaatooor.” If I said it often enough, suddenly I began to forget what exactly it meant. It would even start to sound foreign, made up, empty—like a balloon suddenly losing its air. As I sat there staring at the broken glass, trying to numb myself against the indignity of my fearful choices, I found myself muttering, “Lori Deschene,” wondering what other people thought when they said it.
I started slowly and softly, as if trying to whisper into my own ear, hoping to reach my spirit without jarring it. I watched the multiple pieces of my mouth scattered in glass along the floor. Then I hastened the pace a little, trying to make the words become unfamiliar. I mumbled them over and over again, tripping on them, spitting them out, trying desperately to forget what they meant—to forget that I'd decided years ago how little that name could ever mean. And then I fell asleep, wondering if I'd ever look in the mirror and like what I saw.
I didn't strip away any layers of myself that night, but slammed so low, I began to learn something that has shaped and guided every day that's followed since: emptiness can be a horrible or wonderful thing, depending on where it comes from. You can wallow in misery, feeling like you have nothing to offer the world just because you haven't figured it out yet. Or you can feel a sense of emptiness that's at once terrifying and liberating, because it means you've let go of who you've been and have opened up to who you can be. It's the deep and dark cavern of possibility and light. It's freedom from what the past has meant and what the future might mean, and it's a sense that now can mean anything.
Emily Dickinson wrote, “To live is so startling it leaves time for little else.” I've often wondered if it's possible to live this fully—if anyone can feel so in awe of the experience of her daily life that she simply doesn't have time to hurt over yesterday, worry about tomorrow, and be consumed with theories as to what it all means and what her life should mean. Just the other day, I read about a research study from Washington University and the University of Arizona that showed people who tackle the pithy topics have a stronger sense of well-being than people who keep things superficial. What this tells me is that we can't ignore our human instinct to want more. We can't pretend there's literally no room for something else. There is—there's lots of room. Life leaves plenty of time for solitude and contemplation. Even busy people have time and space to fill, if not in their schedules, in their minds. The beautiful part of life is that regardless of what it means, we can share the puzzle together. We don't have to sit alone in emptiness. Just by engaging with each other, we can transform hollow bewilderment into full-frontal wonder.
With that in mind, I asked on Twitter, “What's the meaning of life?”
THE MEANING OF LIFE IS TO LIVE EVERY DAY FULLY AND ENJOY IT
Life is not the pursuit of happiness. It's the happiness in your pursuits. ∼@ac_awesome
The meaning of life is to live life and experience this world to the fullest, from dark to light and everything in between. ∼@Jay_Rey
Life is about learning, sharing, never giving up, and having fun. ∼@ lida4ibu
the meaning of life is to become truly happy and to live each day based on courage and compassion. ∼@puffinclaire
Life's meaning is to be open to all that comes your way and to pursue whatever your heart desires. ∼@mmalbrecht
Occam's razor states that the simplest answer is usually the right one, but humans don't do so well with simple. We like to identify patterns in our lives so that we can think about what we think it all means. We get so fixated on why specific past events occurred and what we can do to make specific future events occur that we often miss being in the occurrences of now. It's not easy to accept that what is just is. We want stories—a story explaining how we got here; a story guiding the day as it happens, like the ever-wise, ever-calm voice-overs you hear in the movies; and a story to leave behind when we pass on so our lives will mean something more than the simple, solo experiences of living them.
It's not nearly satisfying enough if the point of life is to live each moment fully, because that doesn't provide an answer as to why the moments eventually run out. A moment will never seem like enough when you pit it against the desire for an endless supply of moments. In Will Durant's On the Meaning of Life, a compilation of perspectives from Depression-era
