Andrea Fitzpatrick lost her job last August and foundered for a while, as she struggled with her sense of self-worth. She had identified herself with her career, whatever it had happened to be. Corporate advance, money, and social status were the things that defined her. Unsurprisingly, they were not the things that made her happy, something she only truly discovered after being fired.

It’s an interesting story. On the one hand, it was heartening that someone had discovered happiness to come from something other than the superficial banalities of one’s life. On the other hand, it was sad that there are many people, perhaps most, who must actually learn this lesson.

A belief in fulfillment

And so I am not shocked that, like me, god believers are saddened by the hollowness of so many lives lived in emptiness, fulfilled by nothing and driven by the most amoral of motivations. I am not surprised at the satisfaction believers have in their lives, filled as they are with a pursuit that, no matter what unrecognizable form it may ultimately take, at the very least seeks meaning for themselves and everyone. I am not surprised by the confidence of their beliefs, by the resistance their faith has to that which disputes it.

Of course, I know they are terribly misguided for that faith, and the details of their belief are their ultimate undoing, and no reconciliation is possible between dogmatic positions and a truly happy existence. But I say that out of a need to clarify. It doesn’t really matter, this time.

It indicates that a life of true fulfillment comes from everything that seems not to define the majority of us. In the West, most have forgotten so simple a truth utterly. It may be cliché to bring up the fact that material pursuits have replaced our sense of satisfaction with ourselves and each other, but often truth is to be discovered anew in aphorisms like that.

It’s one reason for the divide and the ultimate conflict between those with faith and the secular world they inhabit. On a larger scale, it hints at more troubling issues: the conflict between Islam and the West, as an example, and the failure of either to find areas of common values and goals.

A flow of lives

But I must recede once again to the microcosm of a single life. Unlike James Randi, who is nearing the end of his journey, I can’t look back at a remarkable life to reminisce on scores of remarkable experiences. I’m far too ordinary.

There are issues to deal with, and things that seem like setbacks, but its very simplicity makes my life deeply fulfilling. Alex and I have a circadian beat to our lives that offers happiness I could scarcely imagine when I was in my twenties, clambouring for money and sex and superficial relationships and fun, and other trivialities. There is the expanse of Bronte Creek Park near my home, small though it might seem to some, that holds a portion of my consciousness in its fields and woods and paths. There are the hundreds of books in my library, holding hundreds of thousands of pages, that fill up the corners of my barely satiable curiosity. And there is the incidental interaction with people, acquaintances and strangers, offering the opportunity to imagine the details of another life, and, if I can, if only in the smallest of ways to make that other path slightly more navigable.

I like my work and I’m considered fairly successful, but it’s simply a lucky tool that allows me to live a life away from it. There are so many better things, more important things. The breathtaking breadth of human history in front of me at this very moment, for example, or living inside the cream-coloured pages of my library. I’m staggered when I think about the billions of lives that have shaped what humanity is right now; or the trillions upon trillions of beings that have directed the course of life on the planet.

Something in me goes very quiet when the sun sets beneath the purple clouds over the peaks of houses behind us. I feel as though I’m sharing the lives of the finches that wake me up each morning as they build a nest beneath the trough under my bedroom window, which they and their ancestors have done for as long as I’ve lived here. We’ve been here many years, but we’re still apart from virtually all the neighbours. Sometimes when we come home in the car, one of their kids waves at us, though we are silent strangers to them and their parents, and it makes me smile. Alex has a swimming friend that he picks up every Sunday morning. She usually bakes him cake on Saturday night, and he comes home full. Despite our shyness, and what must seem like stand-offishness, the neighbours directly beside us invite us for an hour or two of drink and conversation every Christmas and every summer, and have always been immeasurably kind to us.

There’s so much loveliness, so much fulfillment in life that I’m surprised when I hear stories of lessons learned, like Ms. Fitzpatrick’s. What deep pleasure there is to be found in the world’s accessible corners. What meaning there is in the most straightforward of relationships. How gorgeous things are. How important we all, each of us, are, to one another, to the flow of lives beginning in the incomprehensibly distant past and that builds our story for the sake of our existence alone. How completely beautiful, unknowable, and livable it all is.

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