-- Sacrifice is the spirit of love
Summer vacation has almost come to an end, and as I traveled back, I finished reading 犠牲(sacrifice) written by Kunio Yanagida (published the same year Into the Wild was). It's an essay about his son, Yojiro, who committed suicide at the age of 25 after suffering metal illness for more than a decade. One of his problems being anthropophobia, it was difficult for him to get a job, and thus he despaired that he had nothing he could give to society.
At the same time, he was deeply moved by one of Tarkovsky's films, Sacrifice, which expresses the belief that the reason we can live today in peace is due to "the sacrifice of a nameless person who lives somewhere under the broad blue sky". When Yanagida finds his son brain dead, he agrees to donate his kidneys as a token of Yojiro's existence, thinking that this kind of 'sacrifice' was what he had always wanted.
One of the things Yojiro feared most was oblivion -- the fact that when one dies, even the fact that he lived and suffered will be forgotten and deleted from history. A character from a book I read last summer states the exact same thing, to which the protagonist retorts that he should get over the fear, because "there was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after". Her point is that even if some people remember you after your death, they too are going to die, and in the end, there will be no one remaining to remember you anyway. This logic applies even to the world's most famous person, because at some point, the human species will extinct, and the planet will collapse.
I guess it's a decent argument, but obviously, the truth that everyone dies doesn't really liberate you from the fear of death. Logically, I understand that everything is going to disappear one day, that it's nonsense to dwell on whether or not you will survive death for what amounts to less than a fraction of a second in geological time. But emotionally, I still fear the possibility of dying leaving nothing behind. I want to give my life some kind of meaning, and I think a lot of people do, including my mother.
To tell the truth, I'm a terrible daughter -- deep down in my heart, I have not always respected her. I've told her more than once that I will never live a life like hers, and that I was 'different'. Apart from the years she spent working as a language teacher, she has worked as a full time housewife, and since she started seeing her 60th birthday coming around the corner, she started asking herself (and her family) the meaning of her own life. She suddenly realized she had no personal accomplishments, and began questioning the value and meaning of her 'self-sacrifice'.
Now I realize that the real reason I sometimes have a hard time respecting my mother is only because she is too busy imagining what she could've become and regretting what she could've done that she sadly fails to see the meaning of the life she has actually lived -- the whole process she calls self-sacrifice.
After reading Sacrifice (and all the other books I've read), and living my life for more than 1/4 of a century, I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of life comes from 'giving' which often requires sacrifice. When I give, the receiving person will also give to another person, and that person will do the same and pay it forward. We will all die, but we will all live on as a participant of a 'giving relay' as long as it goes on.
I don't know how much I will be able to give in my lifetime, how many people I will be able to help when I become a doctor, but every patient I help would not have been saved without my mother's 'sacrifice'. Will my patients think of my mother's existence? Most likely not; they wouldn't even remember the doctor after a while. And does that make my mother's life meaningless? Is she eventually going to disappear forever in cold oblivion? I'd say yes to the latter. But does that matter so much when the unmovable truth is that my mother's sacrifice has helped me help the patient (in some way) to live his life and pay it forward (to someone who hopefully will pay it forward)?
Yojiro, at some point, encounters the concept of "indestructibility of human existence" which appears in a passage written by Mircea Eliade, and states as follows: Every death has contributed to the continuity of life, and my own current life is standing upon the sacrifice of numerous nameless soldiers.
We all fear oblivion because that is our final death. It's scary to think that the evidence that we ever existed is as fragile as a drawing on sand. But even if it is a picture on sand, there are new pictures that will not exist without it. Our life, our sacrifice and love will always be of someone's support, and it's encouraging to think that just because we will never escape oblivion will never change that fact -- something we might call the meaning of life.
I should now call my mom and tell her how much I've appreciated her 'sacrifice'. Because that is why I also want to live to love and give.
2015年8月3日月曜日
the cards we are dealt
We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.
-- Randy Pausch
I read the rest of the book (Into the Wild) while I traveled back home, and it reminded me of the fact that many patients who came to visit the psychiatry department had divorced parents and other family issues. McCandless doesn't seem to have suffered any mental illness, and what brought him to Alaska was his intense character and adventurous spirit combined with his love of nature, but what pushed him to the extreme -- cutting off all contacts with his family for two years, and ultimately all human contact for his "great Alaskan odyssey" -- was apparently his discovery of his father's past bigamy (which had ended a couple of years after his birth).
McCandless was never withdrawn, and he actually left some lasting memories in the hearts of many people he met in his last years, but obviously had some problems building intimate human relationships, and it seemed to stem from his parents' mistakes that made his "entire childhood seem like fiction". Maybe he needed something to believe in, and nature -- its absolute existence and its merciless honesty -- was what he turned to. He was apparently criticized of his arrogance for trying to live in the wild without enough preparation, but perhaps it was his naivete -- he'd put too much trust not only in himself but the wilderness as well.
The tragedy was not really the fact that such a young man had died alone in starvation, but that he had to die when he was finally ready to go back to civilization and human community -- his severe experience of developing a bond with the wilderness had somehow helped him move on and it seemed like he had just found a way to forgive his parents' imperfections and his own, but that was when one careless mistake took his life.
Then again, I found a not-so-tragic answer to what I'd been wondering when I wrote my last entry -- how he had felt when he realized he was going to die. It reminded me of what Viktor Frankl had said in his book, about how we were always -- always -- free to choose how to react to a circumstance (and death too is one of those circumstances). The author of the book, Krakauer observes that McCandless was unmistakingly at peace in his last picture, "serene as a monk gone to God", and I don't think it was the author's wishful thinking -- the below is what McCandless had written before deciding to walk out of the bush to possibly end his "great Alaskan odyssey". It was shortly after he had shot a moose and regretted it due to his failure of preserving the meet and wasting it. He'd always demanded a great deal of himself (and others) but this moose episode seems to have taught him the value of acceptance:
Consciousness of food. Eat and cook with concentration... Holy food.
I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has just begun.
Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, example→ A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
Reality.
Independence.
Finality -- Stability -- Consistency.
On a side note, the plane I took yesterday had a problem landing, and it flew past the airport into the city. It took the staffs quite a long time to announce what the problem was, and until then, I seriously wondered if the plane had been hijacked or something, and if we were all going to die. To be honest, I was quite upset by the thought of it, mostly because I thought my life hadn't even started yet, but after a while, I just started wondering what the last thing I had said to my mother had been. Had I ignored her last call? Had I been nice to her? I was actually still holding the book in my hands but the whole McCandless story seemed to have dropped off from the surface of my brain.
After a lot of useless and unnecessary panicking and finally landing on the airport, I went straight to my grandmother's place only to find out she was sick, though it was mostly a mental thing; she is always too busy worrying about dying and feeling sick that it almost looks like she never has enough time to have fun. When she started feeling better, I was going through a pile of books on her shelf, and she told me the novel I was holding was supposedly really good: "What was it about... yes, yes! It teaches you how to survive!" She hadn't read it, and I was pretty sure she never would, so I just told her maybe she could just forget about surviving for a moment, and relax. Otherwise, I really wanted to ask her what she wanted to survive for so badly. If she knew, I think she would stop worrying too much, but then again, I will never know how it feels to be 86 for another sixty years.
-- Randy Pausch
I read the rest of the book (Into the Wild) while I traveled back home, and it reminded me of the fact that many patients who came to visit the psychiatry department had divorced parents and other family issues. McCandless doesn't seem to have suffered any mental illness, and what brought him to Alaska was his intense character and adventurous spirit combined with his love of nature, but what pushed him to the extreme -- cutting off all contacts with his family for two years, and ultimately all human contact for his "great Alaskan odyssey" -- was apparently his discovery of his father's past bigamy (which had ended a couple of years after his birth).
McCandless was never withdrawn, and he actually left some lasting memories in the hearts of many people he met in his last years, but obviously had some problems building intimate human relationships, and it seemed to stem from his parents' mistakes that made his "entire childhood seem like fiction". Maybe he needed something to believe in, and nature -- its absolute existence and its merciless honesty -- was what he turned to. He was apparently criticized of his arrogance for trying to live in the wild without enough preparation, but perhaps it was his naivete -- he'd put too much trust not only in himself but the wilderness as well.
The tragedy was not really the fact that such a young man had died alone in starvation, but that he had to die when he was finally ready to go back to civilization and human community -- his severe experience of developing a bond with the wilderness had somehow helped him move on and it seemed like he had just found a way to forgive his parents' imperfections and his own, but that was when one careless mistake took his life.
Then again, I found a not-so-tragic answer to what I'd been wondering when I wrote my last entry -- how he had felt when he realized he was going to die. It reminded me of what Viktor Frankl had said in his book, about how we were always -- always -- free to choose how to react to a circumstance (and death too is one of those circumstances). The author of the book, Krakauer observes that McCandless was unmistakingly at peace in his last picture, "serene as a monk gone to God", and I don't think it was the author's wishful thinking -- the below is what McCandless had written before deciding to walk out of the bush to possibly end his "great Alaskan odyssey". It was shortly after he had shot a moose and regretted it due to his failure of preserving the meet and wasting it. He'd always demanded a great deal of himself (and others) but this moose episode seems to have taught him the value of acceptance:
Consciousness of food. Eat and cook with concentration... Holy food.
I am reborn. This is my dawn. Real life has just begun.
Deliberate Living: Conscious attention to the basics of life, and a constant attention to your immediate environment and its concerns, example→ A job, a task, a book; anything requiring efficient concentration (Circumstance has no value. It is how one relates to a situation that has value. All true meaning resides in the personal relationship to a phenomenon, what it means to you).
The Great Holiness of FOOD, the Vital Heat.
Positivism, the Insurpassable Joy of the Life Aesthetic.
Reality.
Independence.
Finality -- Stability -- Consistency.
On a side note, the plane I took yesterday had a problem landing, and it flew past the airport into the city. It took the staffs quite a long time to announce what the problem was, and until then, I seriously wondered if the plane had been hijacked or something, and if we were all going to die. To be honest, I was quite upset by the thought of it, mostly because I thought my life hadn't even started yet, but after a while, I just started wondering what the last thing I had said to my mother had been. Had I ignored her last call? Had I been nice to her? I was actually still holding the book in my hands but the whole McCandless story seemed to have dropped off from the surface of my brain.
After a lot of useless and unnecessary panicking and finally landing on the airport, I went straight to my grandmother's place only to find out she was sick, though it was mostly a mental thing; she is always too busy worrying about dying and feeling sick that it almost looks like she never has enough time to have fun. When she started feeling better, I was going through a pile of books on her shelf, and she told me the novel I was holding was supposedly really good: "What was it about... yes, yes! It teaches you how to survive!" She hadn't read it, and I was pretty sure she never would, so I just told her maybe she could just forget about surviving for a moment, and relax. Otherwise, I really wanted to ask her what she wanted to survive for so badly. If she knew, I think she would stop worrying too much, but then again, I will never know how it feels to be 86 for another sixty years.
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