Purpose, kung fu and love

(Link: YouTube - The Matrix Reloaded Agent Smith Fight Scene)
The voice is quiet and calm yet direct and laden with unmistakable menace.

“There is no escaping reason...because as we both know, without purpose we would not exist.
“It is purpose that created us.
“Purpose that connects us.
“Purpose that pulls us.
“That guides us.
“That drives us.
“It is purpose that defines us.
“Purpose that binds us.
“We are here because of you, Mr. Anderson. We’re here to take from you what you tried to take from us...purpose.”

These are the words spoken by Agent Smith in The Matrix Reloaded—several Agent Smiths, to be exact—just prior to engaging Mr. Anderson (“My name is ‘Neo’”) in mortal combat. Despite a display of martial arts skills in utter contempt of several laws of physics, Neo finds himself facing certain defeat against a horde of cloned agents. “It...is...inevitable.”

After three weeks of internet silence, I feel a bit like Neo, weighed down by an unrelenting and ever-increasing battery of tasks. LL and I just spent all of last week up in remote Omak interviewing for jobs to start this fall. The draft resolution to protest the AAFP-Coke alliance needs revising. Several Real Change efforts need attention. Having finally submitted a manuscript of Early One Morning and Late One Night to a New York publishing house, I would like to follow that up with a submission to the publishing arm of The Sierra Club.

Why on earth should I spend any time on a blog that may be ever read by few, if any?

Surprisingly, given that I started with a Matrix reference, I found the answer this morning in a book titled Love, Medicine, and Miracles by Dr. Bernie Siegel. The answer is simple. The answer is love.

In a world of gross inequality, injustice and environmental destruction, it is all too easy to look for meaning in any number of worthy causes. There are principles to fight for, dolphins to save from slaughter, children to provide with an existence of hope and education so different from that into which they are born. The common denominator is that we take these things on out of love.

Yet is also easy to forget this; it is easy to become burned out; to lose sight of a larger vision. It is easy to feel like we have lost our purpose, or more passively, like we have had it taken away by the demands of just keeping up.

This, then, is why I write. To reconnect with purpose. To reconnect with love.

“Love,” writes Bernie Siegel, “heals. The fundamental problem most patients face is an inability to love themselves.” I am not quoting him to suggest that he has miraculous answers, nor that I am somehow remarkable in trying to apply them. I am the patient here. It is I who needs the reminder that this time spent, if done with love, is worthwhile. Just because I did not meet my self-imposed goal of weekly blog posting does not mean I should abandon the entire project, but rather that I might choose to breathe, pause, and carry on.

Love heals. So it should not actually surprise me that even in The Matrix this most potent of purposes can be seen. While the second episode is mostly eye candy and unnecessary explosions, it is love, at the end of the first and best movie in the trilogy, that brings Neo literally back to life. Love is its own purpose, sufficient unto itself.

Of course, kung fu and the ability to fly never hurt, either. But when Neo breaks free and the throngs of Agent Smiths look skyward and brush themselves off, I like to think that what registers on their faces is not so much incredulity as the simple need for a hug.