Group med Thursday. Field notes on vacationing.
Profound purposelessness and the (actual) meaning of life.
“The true meaning of life is no meaning
Its purpose is no purpose
And its sense is nonsense
It is from this meaninglessness that we get profound meaning”
—Alan Watts
I just returned from a 10-day solo RV trip from Chicago to LA.
This year, the trip culminated with a night at the Hollywood Bowl for a live concert of the music of Wes Anderson’s films, hosted by Bill Murray and with performances by Beck, Jackson Browne, and Jason Schwartzman, and an appearance by Wes himself.
The inimitable Bill opened the show by taking a drag of a cigarette and asking, in the way only he can, “What are we doing here?”
When I did my first trip last summer, a lot of people (mostly my parents) asked me why.
Why fly to a different city to drive a 25-foot RV across the country by myself, with no plan or purpose?
My answer? No reason.
I spend every other day of the year doing things for big important reasons, with every minute purposefully planned and optimized for maximum productivity.
Occasionally, I need to pull the plug on planned purpose and experience what Watts calls glorious nonsense, if only to help me be more functional the other days. Julia Cameron calls this filling the well with inspiration for creative projects.
Field Notes on Vacationing
What is a vacation? Going somewhere? Seeing something? Changing scenery?
All lovely ideas, but all having to do with that which is outside of us.
We can take the most exotic trips and yet, if our inner world isn’t properly tuned, pick up right where we left off with stress and misery within a few days of returning. “Take me back!” we commiserate. Maybe it’s not sticking.
Maybe the important part is a change of inner scenery.
I used to feel miserable and empty at even the most prestigious, world-renowned resorts and spas and return to real life shortly thereafter wholly unchanged, with less money, and even more stress about the work I had missed.
Eventually, I realized that wherever you go, there you are. The quality of your being is projected onto your environment. And that quality is permanent and does stick when we return to life.
Nowadays, I feel overwhelmed with bliss eating gas station burritos and canned soup in the back of a camper. I sit driving for hours traversing middle America, staring at nothing but open road for hours with a big grin on my face, all for no reason at all other than to maybe pick up a few new towels from the fancy Japanese spa in Santa Fe or enjoy the mac & cheese at Gus’s Fried Chicken in Memphis.
Inner Excursions
For me, these trips are not about where I stop or what I see, but about timelessness. Being suspended in time. A break from the routine. Curiosity. New energy and ideas. Time to myself. Holy silence. Freedom to be on my own schedule with no constraints from lodging or meals or calls or other peoples’ agendas. An invitation to let in whatever wants to come in and be open to it all.
It’s more of a mental recess than a physical excursion.
Most of all—these trips are an escape from purpose.
And a reminder that the purpose of life has nothing at all to do with our outer world.
If there is any purpose to life, it is to cultivate in ourselves a state of inner being in which the outer world feels like play.
Through repeated exposure to this so-called glorious nonsense, we integrate this worldview and bring it into even our most serious of tasks.
With each trip I take, I’m reminded of these words from Alan Watts:
“We thought of life by analogy with a journey, with a pilgrimage,
which had a serious purpose at the end,
and the thing was to get to that end.
But, we missed the point the whole way along.
It was a musical thing,
and you were supposed to sing or to dance
while the music was being played.”
—Alan Watts
The Fantasy of the Finish Line
As I wrote after my first trip, there is no finish line in life; no fixed endpoint.
Last summer, I got this idea in my head that I’d punctuate my journey with 4th of July fireworks in the Hamptons. Turned out fireworks are illegal there, and we didn’t see any.
This year, without realizing it, I found myself once again planning to see fireworks in Texas, America’s heartland. This time, a thunderstorm of Biblical proportions thwarted my efforts. This time, I couldn’t help but laugh.
Men especially have this idea that at some point, the work will be over, the goal achieved, and then—and only then—we’ll be able to rest.
But the reality is that the tasks never end. The secret is to learn to approach them with a childlike playfulness and lightness of being, so that we may enjoy ourselves no matter our outer scenery. Pro tip for other men: the work turns out better that way too!
That’s the way it goes; with each experience of profound purposelessness, we integrate a little more of it into our worldview.
And the best part is that, as meditators, we have a portal to this profound purposelessness we can step into twice a day, to escape the trivialities of life and to metaphorically sing or dance, emerging each time a little less attached to our life’s outer timings and outcomes.
In Sanskrit, we call this lila or divine play.
Let’s discuss these and other ideas during Collective Effervescence, our online group meditation series, this Thursday July 16 at 8PM ET. Drop in for meditation only (first 30 min) or stay for discussion + Q&A on this and other life topics from the Vedic perspective. Join the WhatsApp group to receive reminders 24 hours before each session, or click Subscribe on this page to have all upcoming dates automatically sync to your preferred calendar.