Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
I’ve always been very interested in the fundamental motivations that drive people to pursue the kind of religious/spiritual path they do. That’s the positive side of my interest. But, perhaps the major reason I’m so interested in this is that I was born in 1965 and so am in the first year of Generation X, which ran between 1965 and 1980, and which, in European and North American contexts anyway, is a generation stereotypically notorious for its serious motivational deficit. The reasons for this deficit are complex, but as Dan Leidl puts it in his forward to “Generation X Goes Global: Mapping a Youth Culture in Motion” (London, Routledge, 2013), this has come about because “We have given our lives to institutions and ideals that now seem like nothing more than imaginative musings, creative concoctions of hopeful days we may never see.” And so it should come as no surprise that this has resulted in creating a generation characterised by a generally cynical and disaffected attitude.
Now, whether or not this motivational deficit and generally cynical and disaffected attitude is, in fact, more true of Gen X in comparison to any other generation before or after them remains, of course, open to question. But what I can say is that my personal experience of Gen X as a Gen Xer myself, is that religion — in its old institutional forms anyway, and particularly in its Christian forms — has slowly come to be seen as a classic example of an imaginative musing and creative concoction of hopeful days we felt we were never going to see.
And now — and especially in connection with the preparation and conduct of funerals — as I approach the end of my fifty-ninth year on the planet, twenty-four of which have been spent as the minister of the Cambridge Unitarian Church, I find myself being approached more and more by people of my own age and a below who are slowly waking up to the fact that they are growing old and will eventually die. And, in the face of this realisation, they are people finding that they need to acknowledge they do not presently have the deep, fundamental religious or spiritual motivation they feel might — and which I believe can — give their lives a sense of profound meaning and worth despite their mortality. Not surprisingly, the conversations I then have with them are nearly always conducted in private, or at least well away from the crowd, because it’s often very embarrassing and discomforting for most Gen Xers to talk about religion and spiritual matters in a public space because, until recently, they were very powerful examples of the imaginative musings and creative concoctions about which for so long they have been so cynical and disaffected.
Now, obviously, for me as a minister of religion, this raises the question of what is it that I have to offer the now religiously or spiritually curious Gen Xer talking quietly to me on the edge of a funeral wake or, perhaps, sitting quietly in my study? The same question is, of course, also present, albeit in importantly different ways, in my conversations with Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Millennials (1980-1995), Gen Z (1995-early 2010s) and Generation Alpha (early 2010s-mid 2020s).
Well, it is now no secret that since the lockdown, I have come to realise the only thing I can to offer them with a clean heart and full belief (pathos), is the creative, inquiring, free and liberative spiritual path called jiyū shūkyō that has graciously been passed on to me from the Japanese Unitarian tradition and its central figure Imaoka Shin’ichirō-sensei (1881-1988), all, of course, via Imaoka-sensei’s close friend, George M. Williams. And I find it telling that central to Imaoka-sensei and jiyū shūkyō is something called ikigai (生きがい). Indeed, as many of you now know, Imaoka-sensei’s “Principles of Living” begins like this,
“I affirm [or have faith in] myself. I am aware of my own subjectivity, creativity and sociability, and feel the worth of living in life (生きがい ikigai) through them.”
Given this fact, before I go on, I need very briefly, to expand a little further on what ikigai means. The word combines ikiru (生きる) meaning to live, and gai (がい) which means worth or value. And, as some of you may already be aware, in recent years, particularly in Europe and the US, there have been a slew of highly successful self-help books published centring on this concept. This is because ikigai — the meaning and worth of living in life — is precisely what so many Gen Xers are now desperate to find. Unfortunately, in many of these books, ikigai has simply been translated as “purpose,” but ikigai is way, way richer in meaning than this because a person who has found their ikigai is someone who has begun to live in a way that helps them pay full attention to, and become deeply mindful of, the fact that profound satisfaction, joy and meaning is found, not so much in grand ambitions or life goals, but, instead, in all our small, everyday activities, both those done alone and together, as well as in the recognition of the underlying sheer mystery and miracle of the intra-active nature of life itself, as nature endlessly does what nature does.
And Nicholas Kemp, whom I have found to be a good English language guide to what ikigai is really all about, notes that when a person realises what their ikigai is (and, of course, it can consist in more than one thing), then, miracle of miracles, they quickly, and in a wholly unforced way, begin to experience and sense life satisfaction, change and growth, a positive way of going on, a deeper resonation and connection with other people and things around them, freedom of a liberative kind, and a positive kind of self-actualisation. In short, they begin to experience a sense of deep meaning and worth of living in life that is called ikigai-kan. In other words, we are talking about all the things Gen Xers — and, of course, many other generations — feel are missing from so much of their own lives.
Now, these are all things that Imaoka-sensei’s “Principles of Living” are concerned to bring about and which are central to the kind of creative, inquiring, free and liberative kind of spirituality he encouraged which goes by the name of jiyū shūkyō.
Consequently, in the last few years, whenever I find myself talking to a
disaffected and cynical Gen Xer — or indeed any disaffected and cynical person from any generation — who, in the face of life’s many profound
challenges, has begun to awaken to their equally profound need to find
ways of feeling the worth of living in life, of finding their ikigai,
so to all of this, my offer to them — and, of course, other offers are always available elsewhere — my offer to them now always consists in finding gentle ways to introduce them to
Imaoka-sensei’s “Principles of Living” and so to the path of jiyū shūkyō. And, during those conversations, if and when I have need for a super-brief summary of what, at heart, the path of jiyū shūkyō
is, I often find myself turning to a short poem by the American poet Mary Oliver called “Something,” because it seems to me
succinctly to say what kind of thing jiyū shūkyō is and, simultaneously, what any person needs to be doing to find their ikigai. And so, with Oliver’s words, I leave you today, and I look forward to hearing your own thoughts on this:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
(From “Red Bird,” Beacon Press, 2008)
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