Where’s my food?

A dog has certain expectations regarding its care:  food, water, love and attention.  At least a walk a day, maybe some playtime, and a secure place to sleep are some of its needs.  The joy of owning a dog can be found in how they so transparently show appreciation for what we do for them. 
 

We have many more needs than any animal.  To meet those needs, we make plans, anticipate problems and depending upon our situation in life, fulfill our commitments to things like our jobs, our families, and society at large.

 

Of course, we expect that our plans for living will succeed because they are based upon our own ideas and experiences.  Control, planning, a dash of luck and away we go.  Even friends telling us that we are wrong about something can mean nothing to us. 

But if there is anything the pandemic has taught us, it is that our own ideas about how we should live have their limits.  It isn’t just that our environment seems to care little about us, it’s having to abide by rules and intrusive plans that we’ve had no part in formulating.  We could update Aesop’s fable, “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” skip the part about hard work ensuring success in life, and instead imagine a more appropriate 21st century scene such as in this synopsis of a BBC video from YouTube:

  An ant colony, facing a drought, is forced to search for water about forty meters from its nest. In their search, they encounter a larger, hostile, colony near the only water source. The larger colony chases the foraging ants back to their nest, kills their queen, and destroys the weaker ant colony. 

A video about one ant colony exterminating another might make someone say that these things just happen. Life can be like that, they would say.  Or maybe someone might make a joke about the moral of the story being to avoid larger ants.  But what do we do when our lives resemble not the triumph of the strong ants but that of the weaker colony, what then?  Do we console ourselves by believing that our misfortune is just a part of life?

In the normal course of events, planning our lives and determining for ourselves life’s meaning and purpose, is fine.  If we don’t do this for ourselves, who else will?  Yet such an approach has trouble dealing with things that are outside our control like setbacks, personal misfortune and, yes, pandemics.  Can something else make sense of these things? 

Why not consider accepting, even if for only a short while, that making plans based upon life experience alone is not an adequate foundation for living?  In other words, life cannot teach us how to live? 

And if you can do that, start an investigation.  Look for something from outside your day-to-day existence to inform your thinking and planning.  Is there an all-encompassing explanation for life, its meaning and purpose, that can be found?  And once found, might such a belief system enable you to better process and cope with reversals and major disappointments in life?