In a Fragmented City, Happiness: Vying in Service to the Good of All (Part II)
leila October 29th, 2009
Photo credit: Tom Dyson.
The older one gets, the more one’s own mortality becomes painfully evident. I had a dream the other night that I was on a jet. My sister was in the lavatory, and I was outside telling her a joke, wanting to make her laugh.
Suddenly, the plane began to plummet. We both grew silent, on opposite sides of the door, and in my head, all I could think about was how much had been left undone.
Maybe I had that dream because recently, I’ve witnessed people around me, young and old, be afflicted with terminal illnesses. I spent the weekend in Northern Virginia, at my pseudo-relatives’ home. My father and another childhood friend of theirs were visiting D.C., and what was meant to be a jovial reunion weekend was tinged with a sense of how quickly life can change.
Mahin Khanum, my pseudo-uncle’s mother, had last week been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. She had been a feisty woman with a sparkle in her eye who lost her husband at a young age and, at a not-so-young age, picked up and moved from Iran to Brazil when her two sons moved there. Whereas only weeks ago she was meddling in the kitchen, piling endless tea glasses into the dishwasher and effortlessly whipping up steaming pots of Basmati rice, Mahin Khanum could now hardly speak or react, let alone bathe herself.
In a rare moment of calm at the kitchen table, which was littered with crumbs and crammed with plates of fruit and half-empty glasses of tea, Mahsheed joon, my pseudo-aunt, leaned her elbow on the table and placed her head in her hand. “Zendegi chegadr zood migzareh,” she sighed. “How quickly life passes by.” Switching to English, sweetly accented with Persian and Brazilian Portuguese tones, she waved her fork in the air and said, “You are young! Enjoy your youth and don’t take so heavily what might come in the future.”
A few weeks ago, I might have dismissed that advice as frivolous. But in the midst of another hectic workday, her words rung through my mind, and I wondered whether I was wrongly associating living a purposeful life with gravity and heaviness. I remembered a quotation from The Secret of Divine Civilization:
It is clear that life in this fast-fading world is as fleeting and inconstant as the morning wind, and this being so, how fortunate are the great who leave a good name behind them, and the memory of a lifetime spent in the pathway of the good pleasure of God.
‘Abdu’l-Baha, Secret of Divine Civilization, page 70.
I can home tonight, and throwing myself on the couch, I picked up my weathered copy of The Secret of Divine Civilization, searching in vain for the passage. And as I did, I flipped to the last page and stumbled upon this:
“Happy the soul that shall forget his own good, and like the chosen ones of God, vie with his fellows in service to the good of all…”
‘Abdu’l-Baha, The Secret of Divine Civilization, page 116
It seems that in the end, what everyone is seeks is a kind of happiness. The way they go about obtaining that happiness, however, runs the spectrum of being of benefit to being harmful to others. Some find happiness in shopping (harmless); some, in volunteer work (beneficial); and some, in vandalism (harmful). When I think about it, I can’t help but think that some of the pursuit of happiness is linked with that nagging feeling we’re going to get old and die.
Well, we are going to get old and die. And like that moment in my dream, many of us are terrified– not so much that it may be painful, but that we might die and regret that we didn’t live a full life.
In this ever-fragmented, ever-frantic city, these thoughts sometimes elude us. Or sometimes, we may mistake a “full life” as being those things that, while wonderful, bring us elusive happiness. I love Washington, with all its quirks, but sometimes it seems as if someone hit a fast-forward button and forgot to hit “pause.” Those of us in this city sometimes live as if we’re invincible– and that when we do die, all that really matters is how many times our name appeared in print.
But I have to wonder that, when this life ends– and if you don’t believe in an afterlife, when you lie down at night and honestly assess what you’ve done and who you are– what can we say about a life in service for the good of all? In this ever-fragmented city, it’s easy to be worn out, run ragged, pulled in many directions, and anxious about career prospects.
It was dusk on Saturday evening, the setting sun peeking through the drawn curtains. Mahin Khanum’s granddaughter, weary-eyed from a sleepless week, grasped her grandmother’s hands in her own, swinging them and singing old Brazilian carnaval songs to her. There, amidst the pain and exhaustion, was a token of ‘Abdu’l-Baha’s words– forgetting her own self, for the good of a loved one in the sunset of her life in this fast-fading world.
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