mpathtowellbeing

With Something More

 

‘Something More’ describes both a yearning for and experience of connecting to things beyond ourselves.  Relating to something more facilitates our feeling empowered through belonging.  The term something more is used here to represent our consideration for spirituality, specifically, through caring for someone or something meaningful to us.

Dasein, or being-there, is a term the German philosopher, Heidegger, uses to describe existing in the world.  This happens by our participating in acts of care, especially solicitous care guided by the qualities of consideration and forbearance.  Care is a state of mind where something does matter.  Ambivalence and apathy are diminished or absent while engaged in solicitous care.  We easily can slip into the void without this aspect to our lives.  Care completes us, it provides us with emotional sustenance.

Experiencing ‘something more’ through caring reduces, at least in the moment of doing, contradiction and inner conflict, which are often associated with guilt and shame.  Existential dilemma as made apparent through questions, like ‘why was I born?’ and ‘what is the meaning in life’, vanish in those moments we are tending to meaningful tasks we care about.  These questions are not resolved through finding answers or solutions.  Rather, they dissolve as the motive for asking them is replaced by moments of caring…with being and doing.  While we are fully feeling through care, there is no need to search for ‘something more’.  We are connected and engaged with what is.

Care for another or for meaningful attention to something external must be balanced with self-care.  Otherwise, we run the risk of losing what we seek due to exhaustion; we may fall backward into ambivalence or apathy.  Worse yet, resentment or anger may well up inside.  If our state of mind and mood shifts too far in this direction, we may experience guilt and shame.  It is very important that periods of care be blended with care of self in order to maintain the capacity to receive benefit.

We are always in the process of becoming, lacking the security of knowledge and facing contradiction, we are constrained to mold our integrity through decision and action.  We cannot do this without an unremitting concern for the possibility of becoming whole however.  Our concern expressed as care is a principle manner of maintaining focus and applying it in the world through our attention to detail.  Through care we move towards wholeness and actualizing our potential.

Experiencing a health crisis or witnessing one occurring with someone we love can awaken us to the realization we are finite, with limited time and opportunity to experience life fully.  Health crises, dying, and death remind us of our mortality and to consider or reconsider what it is we wish to leave behind…our legacy. We are reminded of an obligation and responsibility to fulfill our purpose.  Loss of physical or mental health brings us a message of our mortality and imminent demise.  Major loss requires of us that we arise to the occasion of impermanence and affirm our permanence through our special function.  Sickness and death offer us a chance to connect with our vulnerability, our humility, and our gratitude.  Humility helps us to free our mind from misperceptions.  Gratitude connects us to our humanity through remembrance of our limitation and need for assistance.

We exist because of care, perhaps it is not as much as we would have liked or needed, but always enough to have helped us on our human journey.  To embrace the notion of care is to choose our humanity.  For those of us who are also called upon to be caregivers, we have the responsibility of being there for another or others at a personal level and sometimes at a professional level.  Irrespective of whether or not we are called to be caregivers, we all have a duty to participate in the world authentically with presence…to show up.  We all must make choices.  We are given the option, too, to make ones that help transform the world from the way it is into the way it could or ought to be.

As mentioned in the relationship to the Decision Maker section, embracing something more brings us into the moment and facilitates our ability to focus our intention and attention through acts of care.  It also helps us to enter a state of mind where, in addition to doing, we can simultaneously enter a state of being as we activate our second attention.  By engaging something more, we begin to remember who we are.  We are all patients and recipients of care during periods of our lives.  Dasein, Being There, in the fullest sense of being human, is made possible through care.

SOMETHING MORE RESOURCES INCLUDING MEANING, PURPOSE, AND HAPPINESS

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