Some of the most important lessons of my life were learned in the Navy. Not because the Navy taught them to me, in a pedagogical sense; but because military service can offer good opportunities to learn those lessons, if you're paying attention.
First, I should say why they were "important," that is, "of great significance or value."
Value. Definitions often become recursive, where words refer to synonyms to supposedly "define" meaning. One definition of value is, "the importance of something." Also, "worth" and "usefulness."
If you live long enough, and are blessed or privileged enough to do so with surplus in your life, you may become aware of a certain aspect of the experience of being. An interior emptiness, or disquiet as you regard all the effort and activity of your life, the material things that accumulate and surround it, and you wonder what it all "means." What it's all "for."
Most of us in America are blessed with surplus in our lives. Even many of those supposedly unhappy with their circumstances. I'm relatively confident that they experience this question too, perhaps often.
What does it all mean?
Meaning is important. It's like "stability" in naval architecture. Stability is that feature of a ship's design that determines its ability to remain upright among the forces the sea imposes on it. It may heel to port or starboard due to wind or wave action, but it resists that force and when it is removed, it returns to a level, upright orientation.
If a vessel is unstable, or lacks sufficient stability, it will capsize when subjected to forces other than buoyancy and gravity. It may not sink, though it probably will, but its utility as ship is gone. If it doesn't sink, it becomes a hazard to navigation.
Meaning is what helps provide stability in the interior experience of our lives. It's what resists the vicissitudes of day to day existence, and keeps us upright and moving forward.
Habit can do the same thing, but not to the same extent, not with the same strength. People without meaning in their lives rely on habit, and are often capsized by the cruel fortunes of fate.
Where does "meaning" come from?
Some people find it in the tenets of a particular faith. This is perhaps one of the largest, if not to say "greatest," sources of meaning for many people. Others can find meaning in philosophy, education.
But these are external sources. Abstractions, ideas, that come from outside of our lived experience. We are embodied beings, and lived experience is the "reality" of our lives. And lived experience is where we have the opportunity to make "real" meaning.
Something that I learned, in part through my service as an officer in the Navy, in part through my service as a husband and a father, and in part through the facilitation of an experienced counselor, is that life is meaningless. That may come as a surprise to some.
We bring meaning to life.
We make meaning.
And I suppose I should point out here, that everything you're reading is an abstraction. It is the distillation of my lived experience, and it will remain an abstraction to you, forever. To know what I'm writing about, you'll have to live it yourself. Then it will become your reality.
So, Veterans Day. What is it about?
Ostensibly, it's a day set aside by our nation to honor veterans. A day when all Americans, presumably, acknowledge in some way the value and meaning of the service and sacrifice of those Americans who served this nation in its armed forces. Who wore the uniform of their country, and represented its values to the world.
Mostly I think it's just a Monday holiday for people. But maybe that's just me being cynical.
So another word that we have to define, "honor." I've done that before, but I'll do it again.
Honor is both a noun and a verb. I'll define the noun first, and I'll do it without looking it up in the dictionary.
"Honor" is that quality of individual character that is earned or accrued through the action of upholding the shared values of the group. Someone who has honor, has kept faith, with shared values. It is achieved in action, it is not accrued passively.
Honor is supposedly a good quality, a desirable one. We uphold honorable people as examples for how we should live our lives. As exemplars of the goodness of our values.
As we do on Veterans Day.
Presumably.
"Honor," the verb is a transitive verb. An action verb. You do it to something. My favorite kind of verb. Yours too, if you have a bias toward action.
When we "honor" someone, we call attention to them from the group. For a period of time, the attention of the group is directed toward the individual or people being honored. This is intentional. It has some importance, some value. The attention of the group is intended to be favorable, to be respectful, to be an affirmation toward the object of the attention.
It should be, it's intended to be, reciprocal. In one direction, it rewards the people receiving the attention. In the other direction, it affirms to the group, that this is an example.
Here is a life, or here are the lives, of people who upheld our shared values through action. These are people who can be examples, whose lives or whose actions are worthy (value) of emulating.
And by emulating those lives, those actions, we will make meaning in our own lives.
We will reify what formerly had only been abstractions. We will accrue honor in our lives. We will make meaning, and add stability and strength to our own moral character, the vessel that carries our immortal souls through the rocks and shoals, heavy seas, dark and lonely nights in the sea of existence.
I find this lacking in America. Some enormous part of America is lost. Capsized. A hazard to navigation.
The most recent election of a dishonorable man is a manifestation of the lack of meaning in American life. It's more akin to nihilism. That nothing matters, nothing means anything.
So it is with some bitterness that I come to today's Veterans Day.
This is not to shame anyone, though I wish that those who voted for him might have the capacity to feel shame.
This is just the sad, bitter reality we face today.
What helps me is the meaning I have found in my own life. I won't go and do anything stupid, because, while I may be heeled over at the moment, I know I'll return to an even keel. I don't need to panic.
"Just be cool, she'll hold." Perfect Tommy.
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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:36 Monday, 11 November 2024
