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Manuel is an important and necessary man
Manuel needs to be busy. Otherwise he feels that life has no
meaning, that he is wasting his time, that society has no need for him,
nobody loves him, nobody wants him.
So as soon as he wakes up e has a whole set of tasks to do: watch
the news on the television (something may have happened during the
night), read the newspaper (something may have happened yesterday), ask
his wife not to let the children be late for school, get the car, a
taxi, a bus, the subway, but always concentrated, looking into the
vacuum, consulting his watch, if possible making a few calls on his
cell phone – and making sure that everyone sees that he is an important
man, a man useful to the world.
Manuel arrives at work and starts to pore over the pile of paper
that awaits him. If he is an employee, he does everything possible for
the boss to notice that he arrived on time. If he is the boss, he sets
them all to work right away; if there are no important tasks to do,
Manuel will see to developing some, creating some, implementing a new
plan, establishing new lines of action.
Manuel goes to lunch – but never alone. If he is the boss, he sits
down with his friends, discusses new strategies, speaks badly of the
competitors, always keeps a card hidden up his sleeve, complains (with
a touch of pride) about being overworked. If Manuel is an employee, he
also sits down with his friends, complains about the boss, says he is
working a lot of overtime, claims in despair (and with a touch of
pride) that so much at the firm depends on him.
Manuel – boss or employee – works the whole afternoon. From time
to time he looks at his watch, it’s time to go home but he still has a
detail to solve here, a document to sign there. He is an honest man; he
wants to justify his salary, what others expect of him, the dreams of
his parents who went to such great pains to give him the necessary
education.
Finally he returns home. He takes a shower, gets into some
comfortable clothes and sits down to have dinner with his family. He
asks the children about school, his wife how she spent the day. Now and
again he talks about his work, just to serve as an example – because he
does not like to bring worries home. Dinner over, the children – who
are not the least bit interested in examples, duties or any such things
– immediately leave the table and go to sit in front of the computer.
Manuel too goes to sit down in front of that old apparatus from his
childhood called the television. Again he watches the news (something
may have happened in the afternoon).
He always goes to bed with some technical book on the bedside
table – whether boss or employee, he knows that the competition is
great and that if you do not keep up, you run the risk of losing your
job and then have to face the worst of all curses: unemployment.
He talks to his wife for a while – after all, he is a gentle,
hardworking and loving man who cares for his family and is ready to
defend it in any circumstances. Sleep comes soon and Manuel falls
asleep knowing that the next day he will be very busy, so he needs to
recoup his energies.
That night Manuel has a dream. An angel asks him: “Who do you do this?” He replies that he is a responsible man.
The angel then asks: “Would you be able to stop just for fifteen
minutes during the day and look at the world, at yourself, and just do
nothing?” Manuel says that he would love to, but he does not have the
time for that. “You’re trying to fool me,” says the angel. “Everybody
has the time for that, what they lack is courage. Work is a blessing
when it helps us to think about what we are doing. But is becomes a
curse when its only use is to prevent us from thinking about what our
life means.”
Manuel wakes up in the middle of the night, covered in a cold
sweat. Courage? How can a man who sacrifices himself for his family not
have the courage to stop for fifteen minutes?
Best to go back to sleep, it’s only a dream, such questions lead nowhere, and tomorrow is going to be a very busy day.
Second chapter: Manuel is a free man
Manuel has worked for 30 years non-stop, gives his children an
education, sets a good example, devotes his entire time to work, and
never wonders: “Is there any meaning to what I am doing?” His sole
concern is to know that the busier he is, the more important he will be
in the eyes of society.
His children grow up and leave home, he is promoted at work, then
one day he is given a watch or a pen in recognition of all those years
of dedication, the friends shed a tear or two, and the long-expected
moment arrives: he is retired, free to do whatever he likes!
The first few months, every now and again he pays a visit to the
office where he worked, chats with the old friends, and relishes the
pleasure of doing what he has always dreamed of: sleeping late. He goes
for walks on the beach or in town, then there is the house in the
country he managed to buy with so much sweat, discovers gardening and
little by little penetrates the mystery of the plants and flowers.
Manuel has time, all the time in the world. He travels, using part of
the money he has managed to put aside. He visits museums, in the space
of two hours learns what painters and sculptors from different eras
took centuries to develop, but at least he has the feeling that he is
improving his culture. He takes hundreds, thousands of pictures and
sends them to friends – after all, they have to know how happy he is!
Some more months go by. Manuel learns that gardens do not follow
exactly the same rules as men – what he has planted is going to take a
while to grow, and it is use trying to see if the rosebush has buds
yet. In a moment of sincere reflection he discovers that all that he
has seen on his travels was a landscape outside the window of a tourist
bus, monuments that are now stored away on 6×9 photos, but the truth is
that he felt no special emotion – he was more concerned about telling
his friends than he was in living the magic experience of finding
himself in a foreign country.
He still watches all the newsreels on television, reads more
newspapers (because he has more time), considers himself to be a very
well-informed person, capable of discussing things that he did not the
time before to study.
He looks for someone to share his opinions – but they are all
immersed in the river of life, working, doing something, envying Manuel
his freedom and at the same time happy to be useful to society, to be
“busy” at something important.
Manuel seeks for comfort in his children. They always treat him
with great affection – he has been an excellent father, an example of
honesty and dedication – but they too have other worries, although they
consider Sunday lunch a duty.
Manuel is a free man, enjoys a reasonable financial situation, is
well-informed, has an impeccable past, but what now? What to do with
all this freedom, won with such hardship? Everyone greets him, everyone
praises him, but no-one has any time for him. Little by little Manuel
begins to feel sad and useless – despite all the years he has spent
serving the world and his family.
One night an angel appears in his dream: “What have you done with
your life? Did you try to live it according to your dreams?”
Manuel wakes up in a cold sweat. What dreams? This was his dream:
to have a diploma, to get married, to have children, to give them an
education, to retire, to travel. Why was the angel bothering him with
all these senseless questions?
Another long day begins: the newspapers, the news on the TV, the
garden and lunch. Sleep a little, do whatever you feel like doing and
at that very moment discover that you do not feel like doing anything.
Manuel is a free and sad man, one step away from depression, because he
was always too busy to think about the meaning of life, while the years
flowed by under the bridge. He remembers the lines of a poem: “he
passed through life/but did not live.”
But it is too late to accept that, so better change the subject.
Freedom, conquered with so much struggling, is just exile in disguise.
End: Manuel goes to Paradise
In the two preceding columns I analyzed Manuel’s life, how he was
always busy and finding that work – whatever the work may be – gives
life a meaning, but never wondering what that meaning might be.
Later on Manuel retires. For a while he enjoys the freedom of not
having to wake up at a certain time and being able to use his time to
do whatever he pleases. But soon he falls into depression: he feels
useless, far removed from the society he has helped to build, abandoned
by his now grown-up children, unable to understand the meaning of life
– since he never bothered to ask himself the famous question: “What am
I doing here?”
Well, one day our dear, honest, dedicated Manuel ends up dying –
as will happen to all the Manuels, Paulos, Marias and Monicas in this
life. And here I resort to the words of Henry Drummond, whose brilliant
book “The Supreme Gift” describes what happens from this point on:
“All
of us at some moment have asked the same question as every other
generation: “What is the most important thing in our existence?”
We want to use our days in the best possible way, for nobody else
can live our lives for us. So we need to know where we should direct
our efforts, what is the supreme objective to be met.
We are used to hearing that the most important treasure in
spiritual life is faith. Many centuries of religion rest on this simple
word. Do we hold faith to be the most important thing in the world?
Well, we are quite wrong.
In his epistle to the Corinthians, chapter XIII, Saint Paul takes
us to the early days of Christianity. He ends by saying: “And now
abideth faith, hope, charity, these three: but the greatest of these is
charity.”
This is not some superficial opinion of the author of these words,
Saint Paul. After all, talking about Faith a moment before, in the same
letter, he said: “And though I have all faith, so that I could remove
mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” Paul did not avoid the
question; on the contrary, he compared faith and charity and concluded:
“(…) the greatest of these is charity.”
Matthew
offers us a classic description of the Day of Final Reckoning: the Son
of God sits on a throne and like a shepherd separates the goats from
the sheep.
At that moment the great question for human beings will not be: “How did I live?” but rather: “How did I love?”
The final test of all quests for salvation will be Love. No
account will be taken of what we did, what we believed in, what we
achieved. None of this will be asked of us. What we will be asked is
how we loved our neighbor. The mistakes we have made will not even be
remembered. We will be judged for the good we have failed to do.
Because keeping Love locked up within ourselves is to go against the
spirit of God, it proves that we never knew Him, that He loved us in
vain, and that His Son died to no avail.”
In
this case, our Manuel is saved at the moment of his death, because
although he never gave any meaning to his life, he was capable of
loving, providing for his family, and doing what he did with dignity.
However, although it is a happy ending, the rest of his days on earth
were very complicated.
Repeating a phrase I heard from Shimon Peres at the World Forum in
Davos: “optimist and pessimist both end up dying. But they each use
their lives in a completely different manner.”
New book
“The Zahir” is being published all over the world this year. Click here for more information.
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