Motivation

What keeps us going? What is it in us that we recover, heal, or otherwise persist-- sometimes against all reason (or at least it can seem that way to others)?

Another way to say this is: why do we keep getting up in the morning?

There are days when I wonder this about myself! More, I have had many a patient who has made me wonder this about them. So I ask: Why did you get up today? What did you have to look forward to? This second question is presumptuous. We often have no choice; life persists in us, and carries us along, sometimes against our own will or better judgment. And I've known many people who despair upon awaking; indeed, they have nothing they are looking forward to.

But I ask to try to get at their hope... And because our days are long indeed if there is nothing to anticipate about them. But despair itself is a feeling, not merely an absence of hope. And even in the utter wasteland of hopelessness, there is often something, some little thing, the prospect of which gives us something to look forward to: maybe a kiss, or a smile, or a kind word, or just the glimpse of a face through weary eyes. It is astonishing to me how little it takes to motivate a body for the living of a day, even when that day is going to be punctuated with wretchedness and pain.

And I believe we miss the point when we wonder what is sufficient. My hospice patients often help me appreciate the little things in life, the transient jewels that sprinkle each day like mannah, to be enjoyed in the moment, and then let go, because, really, there is no keeping them...

Buddhists remind us and themselves about the impermanence of all things, and indeed, so it is. Yet we find ourselves motivated to leave a lasting mark-- a monument, a program, a life-changed, a plaque, a memory we hope will somehow become unforgettable. Sometimes we even measure our lives by that, especially when we ask, ourselves and others, what difference we have made. I mean by this to say that there exists in us, I believe, a kind of resistence, a hope against hope, about our own impermanence. This arises in us even when, maybe especially when, we are most aware of the imminence of our own passing.

I saw this tension the other day in one of my female patients, a relatively young mother of two relatively young adult children. She has been living with a great deal of pain now for longer than any of us would rationally want, yet she wakes up every morning, and endures every day. Why? On the one hand because to see her husband or her children-- just to see them-- gives her joy, or at least satisfaction. It is enough. And on the other hand, being the mother she is, she guards the hope that each day she has with her kids might better enable her to make a more permanent mark on them-- she is, in other words, still "raising" them! And really, what mother ever stops raising her children? So she finds sufficient motivation in seeing her family and sufficient purpose in keeping alive in herself the sense that she is influencing her children's lives for the better. "They will remember me," she tells me. Her all too apparent impermanence is triumphed over by that consolation.

Sic transit gloria...