Do I Dare Disturb The Universe?

What do you do when you feel an overwhelming question well-up inside of you? 

A question that, if asked, may disrupt your friendships, how people view you, and whether you’ll get invited to parties ever again. 

“Do I dare disturb the universe?”  

So said Prufrock, the central character in T S Eliot’s masterful poem, The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock.

Eliot was only 25 years old when he wrote the poem.  It is a haunting look at the future that he saw in the eyes and actions of the adults around him on a backdrop of a meaningless war facing the world in 1914.  Prufrock was one of those aging, second-half of life adults, that Eliot was looking at. 

Prufrock was overwhelmed by a question.

Has my life become trivial, like those I see around me, or does it still have a meaning? 

And underneath this anxiety was an even deeper hesitation.

Do I dare disturb the universe? Do I have the courage to speak out this question?

None of us want to be confronted by the question, ‘has your life become trivial?’  We can feel the hairs on the back of our neck bristle with indignation at the cheek of it!  But Trivial is an ancient word, with an incisive meaning. The word is derived from our modern word Crossroads. TRI = three and VIA = Roads. Life is a constant encounter with crossroads, with an artery that come from our past and spreads out to possible roads of our future. The word originated from the sight of hordes of people from the community gathering around a crossroads, all busy talking and milling around, looking like they are doing something, when in reality they are doing nothing and going nowhere. 

If Trivial is the name of this crossroads in late adulthood, then one of the consequences of hanging around and setting up camp there called Atrophy. Atrophy is where the unused muscles in our bodies and minds and courage, don’t just get tired and unfit, they actually shrink. They get smaller. (That’s why resistance training is the most important exercise we can do, as we age.) Pushing back, against life’s pull towards complacency, is the only thing that will save us. When Dylan Thomas said, ‘Do not go gentle into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light’, he wasn’t just being poetic, he was being prophetic. He was like a fireman screaming at us to get out the fire hoses and fight back the flames before it’s too late. The same cry was made by the actual Judeo-Christian prophets who said, ‘Do not be like those who shrink back’. If we don’t keep on growing forwards, as aging humans, then we will shrink backwards. 

If loitering at the crossroads of Trivial, creates Atrophy, then the pathway out of this place I will call, “I will not die an unlived life” (From the opening line of Dawna Markova’s masterful poem of the same name).

Life, as Leonardo Da Vinci said of a great work of art, is never finished.  We should not be trying to neatly orchestrate the completion our lives at death, like a finished masterpiece. Our life goes beyond our death. We are always outlived by who we have become and are becoming. The winner of the 100 metre sprint does not finish their race with their focus on the finish line, they focus beyond the finish line.  This ‘beyond-life’ horizon is what impels us towards the fully lived life. If we make death the end of the road, then we will be shaped by an impending end. We will slow up too early in mind, attitude, and investment in others. But the lived-life, (as opposed to the unlived life), focuses beyond death. It focuses on legacy, on what we can invest that will outlive us. Sir Ken Robinson said, ‘What we do for ourselves will die when we die; what we do for others will outlive us’. 

The lived-life outlives us.  The unlived life, the trivial life, the shrinking life, gets increasingly concerned and invested in things that really don’t matter that much. We learn to elevate molehills into mountains. It’s a slow and often imperceptible slide, a gentle seduction of those beautiful naked Sirens on the rocks of Greek mythology, calling out to us, ‘comfort, comfort; you’ve earned the rest; let someone else take on those challenges’. 

The lived-life, as the sports analogy goes, ‘leaves it all on the field’. Not in sweaty, driven, anxious activity, but in who we are becoming and how we are investing who we are becoming, into the lives of those who follow us. Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl’s, clarion message was that life never stops calling to us, whatever our circumstances, even in the shadow of death. It is asking for our attention, whether it is the loneliness of our next-door neighbour, or the environmental and existential crisis of these days. It’s always calling to us until the day we die. Vocation (Latin To Call), is our response to that call and whilst my job may end at 65, my vocation doesn’t.

And so Prufrock, seeing all of us mingling around the crossroads called Trivial, is agonising. ‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’  Do I dare raise the question to second-half of lifers, as to whether they are hanging around Trivial, being drawn off down Atrophy, or leaning in and taking the road that goes beyond their death called ‘the lived life’? Prufrock was agonising because he knew he was surrounded by people like himself, who did not want their view of their lives disturbed by challenging questions. He was disturbing even himself. Like him, those around him didn’t want it suggested, in the words of Thelma and Louise, that ‘we got what we settled for’. Prufrock knew only too well that people who speak up, who disturb the status quo, who question how we spend our time, are called Prophetsand they are more than likely to find their own head handed to them on a platter!

Yet Prufrock, like all reluctant prophets, couldn’t pretend to not see what he had seen. He’d seen what happens when middle aged people stop growing, he’d seen these second-half of lifers hanging out of their windows, sleeves rolled up, smoking a cigarette, disillusioned and unchallenged.  Prufrock was struggling with the pressure he felt onhim and in him. The fear. The fear of his own death. The fear of being misunderstood. The fear of being called too intense. The fear of being left as an outsider. He didn’t want to be mocked or undermined, he wanted to be liked, admired and desired. 

And yet.

And yet life’s realities were screaming at him.  Just as Eliot couldn’t ‘unsee’ the levels of meaningless he was confronted with around 1914, so we cannot ‘unsee’ every form of poverty, injustice, environmental and existential crises, vacuous political values…. We cannot ‘unsee’ what we see.

“Dare I disturb the universe?’

Part 2 of this blog – I Will Inhabit My Days, to follow next week, with some (hopefully) concrete suggestions for living the lived-life.