Miracle of Miracles

Musings on the meaning of life.

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

It has been said that aging is not for the faint of heart.

Having just endured my sixty-first birthday, I can attest that this statement is true. Although in my head I am still twenty-three, thin and healthy, flirting with disaster but filled with promise of a life ahead, my body tells me otherwise. I am diabetic and have an autoimmune thyroid disorder, both of which plague me with symptoms and require numerous medications, along with those for high cholesterol, slightly high blood pressure, and essential tremor. My medicine cabinet resembles the overstocked shelves of our local CVS.

It has also been said that youth is wasted on the young.

This, I believe, is absolutely true. I cannot begin to imagine the better choices I might have made had I known then—at twenty-three, thin and healthy, flirting with disaster but filled with the promise of life ahead—what I know now. After six decades on this spinning rock of ours, I have learned to make conscientious decisions that take both others and any intended consequences into consideration. Mind you, it took me at least five decades to understand that I was not the only person who mattered and that my actions could have lasting and untoward effects on those who love me.

On my recent birthday—a day spent in bed with some vague stomach bug that miraculously cleared up by the following morning—I was overcome by an existential crisis. This was not the first of its kind. I have, at various times over the past ten or twenty years, bemoaned the fact that I am heading into what should be my “golden years” without having made any real mark on the world. I make art nearly every day now, but it gathers dust in my office and on the digital shelves of my eBay and Etsy shops. I am and likely will never be the Great American Artist I thought I would be when I set out for art school at the tender age of eighteen. I write, as you can see, often. But I have yet to write the Great American Novel, and because I spend so much time reading for a living, I may never (although I have ideas and notes and recordings that I’ve made while driving from one errand to another). I am not an academic, not part of a think tank. I’m no world-renowned chef, although I do love to cook and think I’m reasonably good at it (I mean, the roast beef and latkes I made for our first night of Hanukkah? C’mon!). At my age, I’m not likely to become a celebrity anything or leave more than a ripple after my funeral.

But then, as often happens, I read something that strikes a chord in me, just in the nick of time. This morning, I came across a passage in an amazing book I’m proofreading that is, oddly, a book on wisdom and wealth. (I promise you, I WILL recommend this when it is published because it gives me hope for the world and for my future.) The author says, and I paraphrase for pre-publication legal issues, that our very existence borders on the miraculous given that we emerged as conscious human beings—capable of reflection, wonder, and choice—out of an infinite number of planets, celestial bodies, and stardust.

During his early days at divinity school, my husband had a revered professor named Frank Tupper (of blessed memory). At the start of every new year, he would walk around and around the lecture hall, speaking the whole time about the vast galaxies and the unimaginable size of the universe. Then he would place the tip of his pen against the white wall and ask “What would make us believe that G-d, the creator of all of this, would care about us? The tiny beings who live on this tiny dot?”

I don’t know what the various answers were to that question, but since most of those students are now ordained pastors, religion professors, or hospital chaplains, they must have decided that we specks are worthy of G-d’s time and attention.

There are so many existential questions at work here. What is our reason for being? What is the meaning of life? Why were we brought to life on this planet at this time—a blip in the long history that has been and is yet to be?

Is it to make something of ourselves? Or is it, as I am coming to believe, to simply do our part for tikkun olam—the Jewish concept of repairing the world through social justice, charity, and acts of human kindness? I started to ask if we, in the very long run, would be remembered for the Taylor Swifts of the world, but even Taylor seems to understand that there is more to life than celebrity status.

I know that I am a far better person at sixty-one than I was at twenty-three. I know that six decades has taught me to be kind and caring, empathetic and sympathetic, to see who people are and meet them exactly where they are. To give others grace. To give myself some grace, dammit. I will likely never be “someone,” but I am someone. I love and am loved. I believe that I was gifted the little miracle of life and that my purpose is to give back as much as I can.

My legacy will be whatever I do with the rest of the precious little time I have on this planet—and while I will continue to write and to cook and to make art and to think as best I can, I will not do it for the sake of prosperity. I will do it because it gives me joy and feeds my brain and my soul and that, in turn, enriches my life and helps me to be there for others.

That is my meaning in life.