But where was I going to start? The world is so vast! I can start with the country I know best, my own. But my country is so big! I better start with my people. But my town, too, is very large. I better start with my street. No, with my home. No, with my family. It doesn't matter, I'll start with myself.
Elie Wiesel, Souls on Fire
At birth we are given the best of gifts: life, and as our first gift we are offered a fantastic world in which to live.
These gifts, often despised and abused, will always be our most authentic and valuable possession.
But even so, as Thoreau notes in Walden, most of us have so little respect for life that we reach the moment of death without having lived. Erich Fromm also expresses this fear when he declares that the greatest tragedy of life is the fact that most human beings die before being fully born.
My mother and father instinctively knew that living life was an art to be celebrated. From outward appearances one could tell that they had very little reason to celebrate. They were penniless Italian immigrants struggling to make a new life in a strange and hostile land. They had neither the language nor the sophistication to easily adapt to this new culture they had chosen, but they accepted the challenge with gusto, abandon, love, faith, and a great sense of humor.
They found a modest place to live and painted it pink with white trim. After a few months, the place was even more contrasting and full of life, as it was full of gardens with flowers and fruits, and vegetables of the season.
The birds were the first to accept their new neighbors, as they had fresh water and sunflower seeds that Dad placed on their winged path from here to there.
Mom was foodie envy. Her gnocchi and her ravioli melted in your mouth like meringue. Her risotto Milanese and her polenta, which she lovingly simmered for what seemed like an eternity, were her masterpieces. The aroma of garlic, anchovies and olive oil that came out of her “magna calda de ella” caused everyone in the vicinity to water their mouths. When singing, her voice was classical and her big, tender eyes were always full of acceptance.
Mom and Dad were neither famous nor had a bad reputation during their lifetime. They lived each day simply, beginning with a huge mug of latte and ending with a walk arm in arm through the neighborhood. They accepted tragedy and death as they accepted joy and birth. All as part of life.
They were married sixty years. Mom died at eighty-two and dad at eighty-six. Mama was almost as beautiful at the moment of her death, as she was in her lace dress in the photograph of her wedding day. Dad was lean, active, and vital at eighty-six years old. His last request, after learning of his imminent death, was to take a short trip to the North Beach area of San Francisco, where he could sunbathe like in old Italy. He also asked to spend a weekend in Las Vegas, where he could make one last shot at beating the banker at a five-cent slot machine. Both wishes were granted.
He loved life so much, that even after his illness left him blind, he was able to say, “It's okay. If I'm given a little more time, I know my way around the garden and I'll still be able to feed the birds.”
I grew up in this lively environment. Of course it was not always easy. There were times of tears and despair when, if it hadn't been for the music, for the laughter, for Daddy's wisteria over the doorway, and for Mommy's delicious cabbage cake and stale bread, we couldn't have kept our bodies alive. and high spirits. But my "beginning" was very good and it was strengthened over the years.
I learned to love. I learned to feel with passion and to express what I felt without any shame. I learned to laugh. I learned to see. I learned to listen. I learned to feel interest. I learned to take full responsibility for my world. I learned to make every day a new adventure. I learned that taking from life is a privilege, and that giving life my individuality was my responsibility.
The idea that my family and I lived in a special way never crossed my mind. It was simply a matter of living fully as the unique human beings that we were. As I grew older, I had no idea what decisions, free will, or self-actualization were.
Like those around me, I allowed myself to embrace life, and the rest came naturally.
Like those around me, I allowed myself to embrace life, and the rest came naturally.
Since then, in my studies, at work, and in my daily life, I have experienced several rude awakenings. Most people are not happy and do not expect to be in this life. Mental health statistics continually show the increase in patients in hospitals and mental clinics. Today, there are roughly 300,000 people in 324 state and county mental institutions in the United States.
More than two hundred thousand individuals receive treatment in clinics that provide external service. About 125,000 chronically depressed sufferers are in desperate need of treatment, which they receive on and off, or not at all, because it is out of reach. It is believed that one in seven Americans will need some type of psychological treatment before reaching middle age. There are roughly one million two hundred thousand emotionally disturbed children between the ages of five and nineteen. Some receive token aid but most go without.
Fifty thousand men and women commit suicide annually in North America, and there are eight to ten attempted suicides. This statistical number is increasing at an alarming rate. In the past, the highest number of suicides occurred among the population of sixty-five years and older, but the most terrifying thing is that the rate that is increasing the most is that of the adolescent group!
Divorce rates have reached such a level that modern marriage is no longer more than a social phenomenon of trial and error, without any deep meaning for couples. In some states divorce rates exceed marriage rates.
Child abuse has become an epidemic, and is the leading cause of child hospitalization. It is not uncommon to hear accounts of parents beating their children blind or imbecile, burning them with cigarettes or boiling water, or committing other such atrocities on them.
Although by this stage of my life I should no longer be impressed by these acts, they still amaze me and I don't understand why, if people can choose between joy and despair, they so often choose the latter. My daily experiences put me in constant contact with individuals who seem totally lifeless and alarmingly apathetic, most frighteningly their complete lack of respect for you. Most of them hate themselves, and they hate where they are, and if they could, they would choose to be someone else or somewhere else entirely. They are constantly suspicious of others and completely bury their inner self even though they live with the painful awareness of their presence. They fear risk, lack faith, and scoff at hope as romantic nonsense. They seem to prefer to live in constant anxiety, fear, and regret. They are too afraid to live in the present, and find themselves almost totally annihilated by the past; they are too cynical to trust, and too apprehensive to love. They mutter bitter, negative accusations, blaming an indifferent God, neurotic parents, or a sick society for placing them in a hopeless hell, where they feel helpless. They are not aware of your potential or do not want to accept it, and they take refuge in their limitations. Most of them are dedicated to killing time as if they had it forever, and not looking for other more viable solutions to their miserable situation.
They ignore the fact that time passes and no matter who they are, none of them are going to leave this world alive. They see existence as a lapse of time, between a birth that they did not ask for and a death that they are terrified of, that they must live with as little pain as possible. They are not interested in your way of life or your personal fulfillment. They engage in vague speculations about life after death, reincarnation, and the realignment of energies, missing the essential reality: that they are alive now; that now they have a life to live; that regardless of what they are now, that is not all that exists, but it is the basis with which tomorrow they will have to create themselves; that at any moment they can renew themselves and reorganize their lives to live in peace, joy and love.
We are not surprised that they avoid these reflections, since they have been taught so little about change, joy and growth. Life for them has always been such a vague metaphysical condition, which scientists and educators shy away from studying and which has been defined mainly by talkative philosophers and mystical poets. These philosophical and poetic conclusions, despite the fact that some of them are intrigued for a while, seem to them rather ambiguous semantics that serve above all to mystify and hardly reflect the “harsh realities of life”.
In the last two decades the study of human life has taken a new turn. It has become the active interest of behavioral scientists, who have become involved in observing how life is lived and in human behavior as it manifests itself in the daily routines of life. They have attempted to project emotional growth, observe different lifestyles, and assess the quality of various observable emotional phenomena, such as joy (Schultz), loneliness (Moustakas), courage (Tillich), isolation (Sartre), love (Fromm), self-actualization (Maslow) and death (Kubler-Ross) with great practical benefits for all of us. They have made us more aware of the roles of our life and death, of the many viable prerogatives we have to choose from, and have offered suggestions for improving the quality and style of life we choose. This has given us a whole new perspective on humanity, humans and the life choices available to all of us.
Humanist Buckminster Fuller assures us, after nearly eighty years of research, that whatever life is, it cannot be weighed, touched, packed, or measured on a scale. Life, according to him, is certainly not our physical body (since we can lose twenty kilos and still be ourselves). The body, he says, is basically water and waste. He believes that life is a state of consciousness. But, of course, this state of consciousness that he speaks of implies much more than mere understanding.
Human persons are not specialized beings like other primates. What makes us unique is our brain, which is totally different from the brain of other living beings. The main function of this brain is to interpret, differentiate and store significant data from the environment. The result of this activity will determine what we will refer to as our mind.
The mind grows with the experience that is perceived through the senses, and from these experiences our personal world is created.
As long as we remain conscious, we are engaged in the process of assimilating our environment, and in shaping our lives. This process is ongoing and active, and we grow as we are forced, willing, or able to accommodate this onslaught of new experiences. At every stage of our lives we will be asked to make personal adjustments to our changing world, as we become more and more involved in the active process of making it our own. In this way, each of us becomes a uniquely designed unit, continually regenerated as part of an ever-changing universe. The main challenge we face in this process is to discover, develop and hold on to our unique being. To do so, we need to be fully aware, sensitive, and flexible. It also requires a very keen sense of humor, and even then, it will not be an easy process.
We live in very complex societies, always surrounded by individuals who are also engaged in this process, and they too will make it necessary and make constant adjustments.
We will meet parents, friends and lovers who will try to distort us and keep us within their image, for their own convenience and comfort and usually in the name of love.
We will discover a society that forces us to conform to its needs and that tries to put us in hoops. We will realize that education is more about filling us with irrelevant knowledge, teaching us what to learn, rather than how to make use of what we learn. We will realize that institutions try to brainwash us and fill us with fear, guilt and shame.
So it is not surprising that we defensively proclaim the impossibility of becoming ourselves "because 'they' won't let us."
Now we understand why the philosopher and playwright Jean Paul Sartre, in his short masterpiece No Way Out, definitively concludes that “hell is other people”.
This belief within our abandonment is further reinforced when we are asked to consider the history of the human person: values, technology, religious beliefs, and political systems.
The result of this study produces a sad image of ourselves as rigid, self-centered, terrified and powerless victims at the mercy of forces greater than ourselves.
Our past has provided us with incredible scientific discoveries, which have projected us into the freedom of space. However, on Earth we still have riots in the streets and we need formal legislation to ensure human beings with basic livelihoods and the right to live with dignity, the most fundamental need for the realization of our full human quality.
We live in a political system that prides itself on its sophisticated attitude and dedication to universal peace and freedom, yet we face a past that reveals that we are no more pacifist, less prejudiced, or less militant than the political systems we that we fear and condemn. We, too, have played an active role in the bloodiest century in history. A recent study of the history of religion did not produce more optimistic or successful conclusions. We have found a vast number of individuals who feel abandoned and alienated from God and their churches and many mistaken fanatics who have succeeded in rationalizing apathy, hatred, prejudice, fear, violence and even murder in mass arguing that it is the... will of God!
From this heartbreaking historical perspective of human beings, and the institutions they have created, it is not surprising that we must turn to outsiders to find hope for the future. We are told that we have failed and will continue to fail. Some philosophers and scientists even warn us of impending extinction.
We are assured that, at best, we are “sick” and helpless, and we cry out for help. We are forced into a medical model of behavior which implies that our failure to fully function as human beings is due to "pathology" from which we must be "cured." It is represented to us as a mill wheel, moving in circles and going nowhere.
If we accept this profile of the person, it is highly questionable that we will ever achieve the strength to rebuild the emotional, physical, and ecological ruins we have caused. It is highly unlikely that we can ever restore our faith in human dignity; it is more likely that we will be unable to prevent our own apocalypse.
I am convinced that today we have enough knowledge and understanding of the potential of personality to make hate, fear, pain, hunger, war, and despair obsolete. My argument is that there is no going back, that we are not prisoners of the past, that we can start from where we are.
We suffice ourselves. There are no “others” to blame, each one of us is that “other”. If we carefully study human behavior, we often discover that the emotional helplessness, apathy, and lack of understanding and reluctance to change that we see in others actually lies within ourselves. We create our own trap and blind ourselves to the fact that it is our doing.
When things are not done, we are the ones who have not done them; when there is misunderstanding, this is also our product; when we find ourselves in a state of emotional pain or tension, we are the ones who have chosen them. If we do not manage to be all that we are, we are the ones who do not evolve and for what we are, the ones who must suffer our non-being.
No "other" can teach us to change, only we ourselves can do it. No "other" can bring us peace and joy, those feelings are ours in a unique way. (The world of fear, joy and tears, is a very private and personal world.) No "other" can realize us. Only we can accept the challenge of being fully ourselves. Only we can decide that we want to fully live our humanity.
Knowing that we build our own life is nothing new, however, most of us will resist accepting it, because if we did, we could be forced to change. We would have to face the pain and emptiness that comes from seeing an unrealized self.
We would have to undertake the terrifying, insecure and demanding search for self-actualization. Finally, we would have to stop blaming others, and assume our full responsibility for creating our own life. There is no doubt that it is much easier to accept ourselves as we have been labeled: failed, scared, helpless and hopeless, unable to meet our needs for fulfillment.
At birth, we are almost our entire, unrealized potential, and thousands of possibilities are present in each of us. We can choose to be born again at any time and accept the challenge of the self that we have yet to know, for it itself is also true.
The world, too, is for the most part, unrealized power and is waiting for us to realize it. The responsibility, therefore, is ours. The manifestation of each person and the world in which we live constitutes the minimum requirement. of our existence, its main purpose and its only hope. The neglect of any of us to become a fully functioning part within the whole, no matter who we are or where we are, will result in lost potential forever. We are worth to the degree in which we are constantly realizing ourselves, as the unique person we are in each moment of our life. This goal will seem unrealistic and unattainable, a romantic ideal. Wanting to realize an ideal can be frustrating, since it means that we are dealing with something imperceptible : an illusion. We are told that the only hope lies in taking an illusory journey to an unrealized, mystical self. We have no certainty where the journey will take us, or what we will find when we get there. We are convinced that our current adaptation is at least an adjustment and that change is, at best, an unsafe risk. We are reminded that illusion is child's play and that following an illusion is naivety.
The manifestation of each person and the world in which we live is the minimum requirement of our existence, its main purpose and its only hope.
However, it is an interesting phenomenon that the unrealized self... demands visibility! It cannot go unnoticed for long. It forces us to move forward or backward, or to live in a state of confusion, anxiety, and frustration. We are aware that something is missing and feel the desperate need to find out what it is. We are driven to grow despite the fact that the rewards may be veiled in illusion; that we always seem to be ill-prepared; that we have failed so many times; that the intellect confuses us, or the emotions overwhelm us and other travelers constantly intervene.
We find that we have very little to guide us in our search and we have to place our trust in the only force we have, that natural instinct that drives us to create, decide, liberate and change. We must give in to the challenge of becoming fully human and trust our own processes in the hope that they will lead us there.
Elie Wiesel tells us about a rabbi who said that when we cease to exist and stand before the Creator, the question he will ask us is not going to be why you were not a messiah, a famous leader, or why you did not solve the great mysteries of the life? The question is going to be very simple: why weren't you, the full, active and fulfilled person that only you had the potential to become?
The challenge before us is therefore very clear: to turn as much of that illusion into reality as possible. After all, our present reality is no more than our illusions once were.
And where do we start? We start in the present moment.
Let go of the past and embrace the now. We begin with the most valuable possession and the only one that can lead us to our own full and personal humanity. We take the wise advice of Rabbi de Wiesel: "Let's start with ourselves!"