Somewhere, right now, there’s a 80-year old man, who spent his career of 40 years in coal mines, and is now slaving over a puzzle with a picture of a cat on it. It’s not like cat puzzles are, or were ever, his first priority. I bet his memories of the glory days keeps him from plummeting into that sad pit of old-age-feeling. But life hands you things, and sometimes, you just take what it hands you — for no real reason at all.
To me, that’s an interesting phenomenon — doing something for the sake of doing it. This means doing something, with the knowledge that it doesn’t need to be done. No one is asking you to do it, and it’s not something you’re craving to do.
It’s a lofty thought, but it’s not a new one. If my English major has taught me one thing, it’s that there’s a large number of men who have written about how much they love doing things just for the sake of doing them. St. Augustine’s happy life consisted of “loving things for their own sake,” and even Immanual Kant would say moral good should be sought for its own sake- “stripped of its impurities.”
I mean, this is basically the English major, right? It’s not like all of us tea-sipping turtle-neck wearers are in it for the money. We like reading because reading itself is good for the mind and, some argue, the soul. The old man does his puzzle for the same reason — it’s good for him. It’s hard to say why it’s good for him, maybe something to do with the keeping up of brain stamina or avoiding loss of eyesight or whatever. I’m not sure there is a “correct view” on why doing a puzzle is good for you. It just is.
When the weekends are slow, I have trouble finding something to do. College kids are either putzing around half of the time, or cramming for what they were supposed to be doing when they were putzing. I think choosing to do something, though, just because, would help ease the restlessness that burdens us. Maybe this is taking the long way home and paying close attention to the architecture of the houses you see through the car window. Maybe, and just hear me out, it’s time to sit down and read that handout of “Background of T.S. Eliot and the Four Quartets” that you know won’t be on the test. Maybe just read it, and see what you think afterwards. It can get tiring to exist in a world in which every action has to provide some known benefit.
Modern medicine works against this “for its own sake” idea the most. Euthanasia itself rests on the principle that a life has no meaning once the body it inhabits can no longer function as it should. If a person lives on a ventilator, not able to speak or move, he accomplishes nothing, or so they say. In this scenario, a life cannot be lived for its own sake, but only for its benefits. Joni Erickson Tada, quadriplegic and life-long opponent of physician’s assisted suicide, told Focus on the Family that she recommended a 26-year old woman named Kim to keep herself on a ventilator, even though her motor-neuron disease resolved her to be bedridden, attached to a feeding tube. Tada told Kim, who was depressed and despairing, to keep on living- but a very different life it would be.
“Your obedience [to God] counts for eternity. Now is your chance to stretch your soul for God,” Tada told her. The woman listened to her, and ended up living on a ventilator for another 45 days. Tada had a conversation with Kim’s mother afterwards, in which she told her those seemed like the most significant weeks of her daughter’s life. Why? She lived for life’s sake, and not for anything else.
It’s hard to imagine a world in which we go about doing things just to do them. It seems that would be a world with no ambition or motivation, and nothing of significance would ever occur. But is that really true? To me, it seems the moment I decide to stop striving so fast and so hard, I find myself finally engaging thoughtfully in the things around me. Maybe the trying, removed from its target, is the thing that really counts.
In the last few lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses, there’s a similar embrace of life — of trying. Trying for no particular reason it seems. It actually looks pretty painful to try in this scenario. The poem goes,
“for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
It seems that the striving matters, here, regardless of the objective or the material gain. The men are old, weak, and dying, and still desire to push. Here, and everywhere, the trying, for trying sake seems to matter the most.
As the old man puts down his last piece of the puzzle, the 26-year old takes her last breath on the ventilator, and another English major snuggles up by the fireplace to start another novel that wasn’t assigned. They’re all trying, for no reason at all.
