The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.” Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being I am always amused when one of my students, with obvious agitation, complains that they still don't know what they want to do with their lives. Well, maybe it's not quite accurate to say amused, because, truth be told, I usually feel exactly the same frustration. There are times when I feel that fifty-two years into this sojourn I've left as lasting a path as my little friend did on the beach in Salalah, Oman. Whenever I'm in a mood such as this I'm always drawn back to Milan Kundera. While reading his extraordinary The Book of Laughter and Forgetting I was introduced to one of my favorite words, litost, a Czech word that translates out as something like "indefinable longing." This mood may just be a result of the passing years, and I've certainly reached the age wherein men go in search of the greater questions; although, to be fair, I've been chasing these answers around since I first read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio (which deserves a posting of its own) for the first time almost forty years ago. Intellectually, I can dissect my personal and professional lives and make a compelling argument to myself that I've made a difference, but, as the great Canadian philosopher reminds us, "we are only what we feel," and I'm in one of those places where I feel like I haven't accomplished a lot. It's probably just a passing blue mood, which will doubtless fade away as a rain cloud in Abu Dhabi. Maybe I just need an adventure - "Watson, the atlas!" (And before Sarah Cohen scolds me, I do know that the line I'm paraphrasing is not actually from a Doyle story)