The various roads to finding purpose in life

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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