Caretakers of the Beautiful

A Meditation on The Meaning of This Life

We are all hopelessly temporary.

We had a fixed date when we arrived and we will have another when we depart. We all have a birthday—and we all have zero assurance as to how many more of those we will get.

None of us are getting out of here alive, and we can probably agree on that.

What we are less unanimously united on, is from where we came and to where we’re headed.

Did we spring from the earth itself and will one day return to it, via a purely scientific process born of time and evolution—or are we the intentional work of some divine, superhuman creator, made to transcend the here to the hereafter?

Are we the result of the mathematics of science or the poetry of spirituality, or something in between?

Are we purely organic matter that has simply changed forms over time, or are we spiritual beings having a physical experience?

Is our morality something that is the product of evolution and self-preservation, or is there some objective goodness that we aspire to because of something beyond us?

When our hearts stop beating, are we destined for Heaven, Hell, or the ground?

Consensus will likely be impossible.

But what about the in-between time, after our arrival and before our departure? Can we find agreement on the point of this beautiful, messy middle we are sharing together: the dash between two dates of our arriving and exiting?

What are we meant to do while we are here?

More and more, I see us as caretakers of the beautiful.

We are present to steward humanity and nature through this relatively brief time we have here, protecting and preserving whatever is valuable and precious to us so that it continues on. And this realization comes from the truth that as temporary creatures, nothing belongs to us. We don’t really own anything permanently—because we are not permanent.

It’s not uncommon here to hear someone saying “Well, I work hard for what I have.” They may indeed work hard (though I tend to believe most people do) but whatever we own is on loan, everything is finite and impermanent.

Author Ryan Holiday writes, “We may claw and fight and work to own things, but those things can be taken away in a second. The same goes for other things we like to think are ‘ours’ but are equally precarious: our status, our physical health or strength, our relationships. How can these really be ours if something other than us—fate, bad luck, death, and so on—can dispossess us of them without notice?”

I’ve often shared the Viktor Frankl quote from his book Man’s Search For Meaning, as he was in a Nazi concentration camp and where life could have felt hopeless: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Frankl reminds us that we do indeed own our posture toward the world, our perspective, our thoughts, our attitudes.

Outside of our own thoughts and choices and inner lives nothing tangible really belongs to us, at least not forever.

I recently began reading a book called The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning: the process people go through when they see the end of their lives coming, of deciding what to do with all the stuff they’ve accumulated over decades of being here, a way of throwing away, giving away, selling, or appointing everything they own before they die so they can spare their loved ones the mental and physical weight of going through decades of material things while also dealing with death of someone they love, who is no longer here to advise them on their wishes. It’s a stark reminder that we aren’t here permanently, so ownership of everything will ultimately be given up or transferred.

Stop and consider the transient and fleeting nature of everything we look to for security and stability:

Our careers come and go. We lose jobs, change jobs, start businesses, lose businesses. We retire or begin new ventures. We let go of projects and initiatives and organizations that we gave so much of ourselves to, and we lose control of whether what we did will be honored or destroyed.

Our children may be “ours” in the philosophical and metaphorical sense (we can claim them on our taxes for a while), but they are not of course our property. We steward them and support them until they become adults at which point, we are not legally responsible for them (thank God).

Our belongings and possessions, our cars and homes feel like ours but they are temporary and vulnerable to time and circumstance and deterioration. One fluke storm, one inattentive moment at the wheel, one bad bit of wiring, one rising river away from losing our treasured stuff.

Our families and friends are essential parts of our lives, but they often come and go based on proximity, life stage, personal changes, political tribalism, and death. We likely aren’t friends with all the people we were 30, 20, or even 10 years ago. Whatever felt stable and permanent in the moment, turned out not to be.

Ryan Holiday says that all the people in our lives are on loan to us and we don’t know how long the terms of those loans are, and so we need to treat people with the respect and care befitting that reality.

And in all of these cases, whether our work, our children, our possessions, our families and friends, our primary job is to care well for everyone and everything we are allowed to temporarily hold while we’re here, which isn’t easy.

We are caretakers of our kids, our loved ones, this nation… and of the planet.

We need to acknowledge and grieve that collectively we have been terrible stewards of this place, that we are not leaving it better than we found it.

A few years ago I was in New York State where I grew up, visiting family and I decided to do what many of us do when we’re back in a place we used to live. I drove by our old house—big mistake! I remember being really upset.

The new occupants had cut down my favorite tree that I used to love to climb on and rest beneath. They let the landscaping go, the sidewalks were all cracked and broken, they’d repainted the house in a really ugly color, and in general the place was a mess. I remember when we lived there, my dad taking such care with the lawn and landscaping and the new occupants just didn’t seem to care. I wanted to knock on the door and say “Wow, you really junked up the place.”

I thought: What did they do to the home we so lovingly cared for?

That’s probably a question many of those who came before us would ask if they were able to come back and visit.

I know it’s a question indigenous Americans would rightly ask if they were here today, as they see how we’ve depleted this nation’s resources, polluted its waters, destroyed wildlife habitat, and pushed countless species to endangerment or extinction. As a people who long understood their responsibility as temporary caretakers of this place, collaborators with nature, interdependent with all living things, they would surely lament what the new occupants have done with the place.

Friends, since we are temporary and yet surrounded by so much beauty, we need to be good tenants, good neighbors, good caregivers, good caretakers. Because this space and time are precious to those who will follow us.

70 to 100 years from now, our homes, our towns, this nation, this planet will be occupied by people who are not us. They may not even know our names or anything about who we were (at least directly), but they will have received an inheritance from us: the place we left them.

We aren’t just caretakers of material things and natural resources and relationships, but our values and of the things we care about: equality, diversity, justice, love, hope: as we have heard it framed, “bending the arc of the moral universe.”

That’s what is at stake in the most important election of our lifetimes: not just the political structure and legislative realities we leave to those who follow us, but the people and causes that matter to us: the kind of nation, the collective people we become.

Today, take note of whatever is precious in the world: the things and people and causes that are worth preserving, worth protecting, worth sustaining, and remember that everything is in your hands temporarily.

It is not guaranteed to endure or persevere.

No natural resource or human right or national reality is a given.

Some of it will depend on what we choose with this day.

May we be compassionate and courageous caretakers of the beautiful.

Be greatly encouraged.