The Meaning Of Life

Did the above title perhaps peak your curiosity beyond the mundane heading? Good, I drew you in! You weren’t looking for an easy answer, were you? Searching for life’s meaning is a feverishly futile quest embarked upon by countless curious floaters who venture to set sail into the deep channels of enlightenment’s holy waters. Nine times out of ten, the very search for humanity’s chalice of significance is what inevitably leaves its traveler paralyzed with disenchantment. As I leave port for what’s sure to be another spellbinding experience, what I offer below is a glimmer of uncommon audaciousness in an attempt to throw us from our prosaic stagnation.

Below is an exert I’m borrowing from the most recent book I read, In the First Circle, which highlights true optimism. More than 700 pages are used to describe what its author, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, came to experience first-hand during the repression of ordinary citizens in the post-WWII Soviet Union. Interred in the nebulous depths of the Lubyanka, one of Russia’s most famous and merciless prisons, Solzhenitsyn identifies how one inmate bears this backbreaking bereavement:

“When I was outside and read what wise men had to say about the meaning of life, or happiness, I always found it difficult to understand. I treated them with respect: They were sages, doing what they were supposed to do. But the meaning of life? We are alive, and that’s what it means. Happiness? When life is very good to us, that’s happiness, everybody knows…Prison has been a blessing! It’s made me think. To understand what happiness means, let us first consider being full. Remember the Lubyanka of your time in counterintelligence. Remember that thin, watery porridge of oats or barley, without a single sparkle of fat. Do you just eat it? Just dine on it? No–it’s Holy Communion! You receive it with awed reverence, as though it were the life’s breath of the yogis! You eat it slowly, eat it from the tip of a wooden spoon, eat it utterly absorbed in the process of eating, the thought of eating–and the pleasurable feeling suffuses your whole body, like nectar; you are dizzy with the sweetness which you discover in these mushy boiled grains and the dishwater that holds them together. And–lo and behold!–you live six months, live twelve months on a diet of next to nothing! Pigging out on choice chops can’t compare! So in our own wretched persons and from our unhappy comrades, we learn what it means to eat our fill. It doesn’t depend on how much we eat, nor at all, but on how we eat! It’s the same with happiness, it’s exactly the same; it doesn’t depend at all on the size of the good things we’ve wrested from life. It depends solely on our attitude to them!”

Emerging less than a quarter of a way through his book, these lines bulged out at me as if highlighted from Solzhenitsyn’s hand himself…saying, “Hey! Even a dejected prisoner, who has not a penny to his name, can choose to NOT be miserable. Look at you damn fools out there with your full stomachs, expensive cars and unhappy consciences. How you neglect to be grateful for even the simple things.”

Over the last two years, since my departure from what was my mecca, the US Olympic Training Center, I’ve navigated the channels of despondency with a longing eye towards life’s subsequent turn of events…hoping that this time they’d shift in my favor. While I don’t consider it remotely productive to spout off a superfluous inventory concerning the rubbish I’ve personally waded through, I do believe in objective reflection. I’ve always found it a double-edged sword, separated by a thread-like line, to peer into the murky bowels of the very melancholic things that make us mortal…digging deep into one’s own basement of intimate anguish. How does one recognize their own shortcomings and failures, while maintaining a firm grip on the doorknob of their innermost imaginings? How easy is it for us to either be blind optimists, blotting out reality with unrealistic expectations (of ourselves and others) or, conversely, squint our inner eye with a glaring look of cynical subordination as we succumb to the perils of this distrustful dichotomy? Well, I’ve come to believe that you can’t be either too much of one or the other; yet, one must delicately possess certain fragments of each.

As Solzhenitsyn vividly wrote, happiness is what you make it. Argh, sometimes I hate how simple the seemingly complex turns out to be! Who among us carries no burden, retains no sin? Not a single one. Try this example on for size…I recently took a job to squirrel away some pocket money, in anticipation for the expensive endeavor of living in Russia, at a Baton Rouge-area cocktail lounge. It’s a nice place, but I’m still a bartender. At 29 years old, I’m a bartender. I’m an elite-trained athlete with a fine university education who happens to retain the experiences of world-wide travel; yet, I’m still a bartender. Do I choose to look at this temporary situation as a negative thing?…a colossal step back in the progress of my life’s series of events? Hmmm. I suppose the guy that spent almost $300 on a single bottle of champaign the other night might have better “means” than I. But does he have more reason to be happy simply because he’s rich and I’ve yet to make an Olympic, World or national team? Because I, a yet-to-be accomplished athlete, is tonight serving him? Being that he has an plethora of wealth, should he be happier with his life than I should be with mine? I say hell no. However, allow me to note that I’ve only recently come to such a conclusion. There was a time when all I thought about was my own ambition and future successes, climaxing at some mythical plane of happiness; I oftentimes neglected to revel in the here-and-now – to accept this moment and decide to by delighted at my mere existence, regardless of what I have or haven’t in my bank account or the medals that do or don’t gloriously hang from my well-decorated walls. Choose to be happy, or choose to be miserable; regardless, it’s ALWAYS your choice.

There is another story I’d like to share with you, one that has captivated me ever since I first heard of it. Paralleling my theme on gymnastics, WWII and Russia, I present to you the story of Viktor Ivanovich Chukarin:

Nazi Germany had it’s bloody boot upon Europe’s throat. When they invaded the Soviet Union, Ukraine fell to the icy grip of Nazi terror. Viktor Ivanovich Chukarin was a gymnast, just like anyone else might be in today’s day-and-age. But at 19-years-old, he drafted into the Soviet army, captured, then imprisoned in a German concentration camp for four years. It wasn’t until the war ended that he was able to return to gymnastics (let alone a normal life). Despite a war interrupting his athletic career, he went on to overcome his own inner post-war traumas and win the All-Around titles at the 1952 Olympics, the 1954 World Championships, and again in the 1956 Games at age 35! Excuse me, but who does that?! Crazy. I simply can’t conceive the perplexing notion of minding my own business, all of a sudden being imprisoned by the Nazis, escape sure death, and return to a sport that I’d utterly dominate like few have ever dreamed (winning 3 golds at 35 years-old)…7 Olympic gold medals later Viktor Chukarin was awarded with his nation’s top prize – The First Order of Lenin (the first ever presented to an athlete). More than that, he became the first of many role models for not only gymnasts, but athletes and people of all walks.

I’ve never met Chukarin (he died in 1984, just a year after I was born), nor could I imagine the things he saw and experienced first-hand. What I can begin to imagine is what kind of attitude would lead a person to overcome such hardships. My own life experiences pale in comparison to his; yet, I (and so can you) draw from his strength of character and willpower. Striving to be better, yet living in and loving the moment, is perhaps simultaneously one of this life’s most treasured and misunderstood gifts.

Matt Hicks is a contributor to the Good Sports Blog, an elite level gymnast who has competed internationally and trained for the 2012 Olympics