For a better world.

I saw a video today that made me think yet again of the power of just wanting to make a difference. The video was about an organization in the US called the ‘I can House’. It was a place where autistic children and youth could go to to improve their social skills and hone their abilities on aspects that they show promise in. I was amazed at the children’s articulateness for here in our centre SK, we see only children let down by the system so badly that we have to rebuild painfully brick by brick. Ours is a journey that seems unbelievably long and hard but then it is also rewarding.

In the 'I can House' video, I saw unusual creativity and a sense of joy that each child had because they had a place where they truly belonged. They worked in groups when they wished to and collaborated on art projects. They sat individually with a volunteer or mentor when they were having bad days. In autism, one learns to take each day at a time anyway and any progress chart is bound to have rather extreme ups and downs. It is the same vision I have for SK – not only do I want our centre to equip the children on the spectrum with viable skills, I also want them to have fun and to discover the joy of being in touch with themselves. I want them to hang out and laugh and do great work – the kind of work that will make the world sit up and take notice, the kind of work that will remove once and for all, the cloak of invisibility that seems to shroud my children.

In the same video, a young volunteer spoke a few simple words – he said that in our short human lives, our only duty must be to make the world a better place – nothing else should matter. I look around at people near my home and see how many make issues of problems that to me seem eminently solvable. Many are to do with ego or false pride. Many are to do with an attitude that is steeped in ignorance. Yet others are to do with the belief that they are above any sort of ill-luck because they are better than anyone else. The observations make me smile. How petty seem the meaningless tussles of shattered delusions and selfish manipulations? How on earth does any of it matter in the long run? There are also genuine problems that people struggle with and try and live life courageously – that always fills me with admiration. That young volunteer with the passionate eyes had it right – working to make the world a better place as far as we can is the best thing anyone can do.

Last evening a young teenaged friend came home to discuss how he and his friend could motivate his school to be involved in our centre. This is a normally shy and quiet young man but I could see how the past few weeks of learning about autism and seeing our kids at work had lit a spark in him deep inside. He wanted to contribute and make a difference. We spoke for an hour and I told him that anything we worked on had to start with awareness. If you are aware of the nature of a problem, you are better equipped to handle it – you react with deliberation and not out of fear. He was surprised to know that even where we lived I had experienced intense lashes from small minds because my child was on the spectrum. I told him that unlike kids, certain adults are capable of a great deal of prejudice and so we should only target youngsters when we try to spread the word and build a community. In him and his friends, I see true promise.

I hope this first step works. I hope that SK’s objective of making a difference and of celebrating unlikely strengths is satisfied one day not too far into the future.

Meanings.

The hunt for a meaning in life appears to me now to be without any meaning whatsoever. Can it be possible that those whom we look up to now, knew when they struggled through life that their existence had a definite purpose and meaning?  I doubt it. People rarely plan their lives out so meticulously as all that. There are of course people with passion and vision but even they would have had days when they wondered if they were on the right path or if they were wasting their lives on things that would turn out to be disappointing or not worthwhile.

The meaning of anyone’s life can possibly be seen in retrospect. That is when the choices that lead to the overall pattern emerge. There may be people who head arrow-like toward their destiny but even in the lives of those individuals there would have been unforeseen tragedies or occurrences that veered them off their path so that their course would not have always been true. It is the very humanness of our existence that makes the search for meaning both seductive and quite impossible. Unless of course we are thinking of it from a spiritual angle, in which case meaning is achieved through self-realization alone.

My husband and I have widely differing views on the ability of an individual to control all aspects of his or her life. S believes that the past is best left in the past and that the focus has to be on the future. I believe that the past never truly stays in the past but influences our moves towards the future and also influences our present. I agree that letting the present be marred by the worries of the past is undesirable but how is it possible to remove all memories of pain ? Does not pain shape you into making decisions differently? Isn’t every individual a sum of past actions and future hopes? How possible is it to live completely in the present when it very quickly ends up being the past?

The burdens of the past are best left behind but the experiences need to stay with you so that you make better choices. In that sense, no one’s past is ever completely left behind. Men, however appear to be able to box their memories selectively. They can shut away painful ones and act as though they never happened. They can then go about and try entirely new things. That is perhaps why S and I do not agree on the value of the past in our present day existence.

The hunt for meaning is an on-going one for me. It will forever be on-going I suspect. It is hard to believe that I exist only because I have to or that the very act of living from day to day is sufficient to create a worthwhile life. But that is exactly what the meaning of life probably will end up being – an anti-climax that states that living each day and doing the task immediately before you is what you have been meant to do all along. That fame and fulfilment are merely buzzwords. That what matters is doing your duty to the best of your ability. That does not actually sound very exciting. But then perhaps the meaning of life is far more mundane than I expected. Maybe the answer has been around a lot longer than the question itself.