The various roads to finding purpose in life

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): "Life consists of trivialities," a friend said to me long time ago. "Making money, paying taxes, getting married, sending your children to school -- those are all trivial things.

"Even having an affair is a trivial thing. The question is: What do you do in life on top of those trivialities? If you do something really significant on top of those trivialities, then you will be noted by history. But if you do nothing at all, your name will just be buried in the dust of time. What is the big thing you are going to commit yourself to?"

This piece of advice shook me violently. First, his question about my commitment caught me completely off guard. I felt very uneasy, because I did not know yet at the time what kind of person I really would like to be: a scholar, a bureaucrat, a politician? I wanted to be so many things, but I am not sure if I had any real commitment then.

Secondly, I was shocked by my friend's idea of "trivialities." It was totally in contradiction to all the views and values I was brought up with in my surroundings.

Making money, for instance, had never been a trivial matter in my family. My family was poor, thus I know from personal experience how painful life can be without money. And getting married -- this has always been to me, then and now, a very seri ous matter. Where I was brought up, marriage was considered sacred, and divorce was considered a stigma for the family. We were always reminded that we should be careful in choosing our partner for life, because marriage can "break or make your life."

Lastly, having an affair, --Astaghfiru'llaahal 'adziim, May God forgive me for all the sins I have committed-- this is not a trivial thing at all! This is a very serious matter! How could this friend of mine say that it is a trivial thing?

The problem was that the friend who gave me this advice was not an ordinary friend to me. He was a great intellectual in my eyes, and I looked upon him as my mentor.

Much later, when I was "more mature" intellectually, socially and politically, I realized that in a way he was right. Much later did I realize that making money, paying taxes, and so on, up to having an affair, will indeed seem trivial if we look at life beyond our individual experiences.

To attest to this thesis, we can ask ourselves the following questions: Does our respect for Einstein, for instance, become significantly reduced after we learn about his many affairs in life? Certainly not! Does our respect for Bung Karno vanish after we learn about his extravaganzas with women? I don't think so! And to see how trivial money can be, look at Mahatma Gandhi's life for an example.

His material poverty was in our eyes overshadowed by his spiritual greatness, by his enormous generosity, his willingness to sacrifice everything in his possession for the cause of freeing his people from the slavery of colonialism. Or look at President Marcos' life! Can all the money he accumulated ever rescue his reputation?

Only much later did I realize that the mental shock I experienced at hearing my friend's opinion was caused by my one- sided interpretation of his statement, especially the part about the triviality of having an affair.

At first I thought that by pronouncing that having an affair is a trivial matter, he meant to say that one should not feel too guilty when one is having an affair, because after all an affair is just an insignificant matter.

Only much later did it dawn on me that the statement can also have the opposite meaning, that it is not worth the while spending so much energy, so much time, and so much money for an affair, because any affair is after all only a minor thing when one sees it within one's totality of life.

A great many things have happened to me since I first got this piece of advice. Yet until today I am not quite sure whether it will be possible for me to draw a definitive dividing line between what is trivial and what is important in my personal life.

There were times in my life, for instance, when I felt that making money was a very important and urgent matter. But there were other times when I felt myself guilty and worthless because I spent too much time doing meaningless things to earn money.

Again, there were instances in my life where I felt good and important being a government bureaucrat -- albeit the salary was very low -- but there were also times when I felt ashamed that I did not have the courage to leave the bureaucracy.

There were instances in my life where my respect for a friend was not affected by my knowledge that his marriage was breaking up and that he was having an affair with another woman. But on the other hand there were instances where my feeling for a friend changed completely after I learned that he was abandoning his wife and two children to be married to a woman who in my opinion seemed to have come from another planet.

These contradictions notwithstanding, however, I think that somehow it must be possible to formulate a personal criterion which can clearly separate trivialities from things that really matter in one's personal life.

In my experience this can be done only after one succeeds in defining in unambiguous terms the kind of life one wants to live. And here lies the problem. We will not really know the kind of meaning with which we are going to impregnate our life unless we do intensive soul-searching.

In my case I came to understand the kind of life I really want after a friend who became my boss said to me one day: "What you value most is freedom, isn't it? You don't care about promotion, you don't care very much about material wealth, you don't even care about how you are being rated as a government official. You just want freedom."

There it was! In my friend's eyes I had already made my choice regarding what is important in my life: freedom! But I did not realize it. I needed to be told by another to become aware of what had been dormant within me all the time. And from that moment it became very clear to me what is important and what is trivial in my life.

Another friend of mine, a drop-out from a medical school, found his purpose in life in a dramatic way. One day, when he was still at medical school during World War II, he followed his professor while making rounds at the hospital. They stopped to see a patient who was a diabetic.

This patient was proclaimed at the "terminal stage" because the hospital had no insulin to treat the disease during the Japanese occupation. "Suddenly I realized, that it was our society which was really sick, not that patient," he told me.

"Thus if I want to help my fellow human beings, it is our society which I should cure from its various diseases, and not the individuals within it." He gave up his medical study, turned his attention to history, politics, and cultural matters, and eventually became a very outstanding politician.

I think there are many ways to find one's purpose in life. I have found mine in a quiet, slow way, while my friend found his in a quick and dramatic way. But whether quiet or dramatic, slow or quick, one has to actively search for life's purpose. No genuine sense of what is important in one's life can be acquired without intensive soul-searching.

Have we as a nation found what is important in our collective life? Have we done enough soul-searching in our collective existence to know what is really important and what is trivial for our nation?

The writer is former deputy chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences and now rector of Muhammadiyah University.

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