Making Nowhere into Somewhere

With Quotes from Lilith by George MacDonald

I have often been tempted to avoid spending time on things that are the most important in life; things like family relationships or playing with my kids. Usually, the things I am tempted to replace them with are empty time wasters. But even when they are things that are uplifting and good in the right setting, I know in some part of myself that they shouldn’t take the place of life’s most important things.

In the novel “Lilith”, by George MacDonald, Mr. Vane is transported through a magical mirror into a fantastic world. In our own world, he was largely focused on himself and his own desires; he loved reading and thinking his own intellectual thoughts. We may think this seems like a fine pastime. Indeed, those are extremely important things to do when placed in the right context. In the other world, he eventually finds that his selfishness and neglect of other people were making his life an empty shell. At one point during his wandering, he is lost and has no destination in mind; then he has a realization that where he was didn’t matter if he didn’t do things that made it better:

“… But what mattered WHERE while EVERYWHERE was the same as NOWHERE! I had not yet, by doing something in it, made ANYWHERE into a place! I was not yet alive; I was only dreaming I lived! I was but a consciousness with an outlook! Truly I had been nothing else in the world I had left, but now I knew the fact! I said to myself that if in this forest I should catch the faint gleam of the mirror, I would turn far aside lest it should entrap me unawares, and give me back to my old existence: here I might learn to be something by doing something! I could not endure the thought of going back, with so many beginnings and not an end achieved... I should but wake to know that I had dreamed, and that all my going was nowhither! I would rather go on and on than come to such a close!

…Coming to a spot where the pines stood farther apart and gave room for flowering shrubs, and hoping it a sign of some dwelling near, I took the direction where yet more and more roses grew, for I was hungry after the voice and face of my kind—after any live soul, indeed, human or not, which I might in some measure understand. What a hell of horror, I thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being! I began to learn that it was impossible to live for oneself even, save in the presence of others—then, alas, fearfully possible! evil was only through good! selfishness but a parasite on the tree of life! In my own world I had the habit of solitary song; here not a crooning murmur ever parted my lips! There I sang without thinking; here I thought without singing! there I had never had a bosom-friend; here the affection of an idiot would be divinely welcome! “If only I had a dog to love!” I sighed—and regarded with wonder my past self, which preferred the company of book or pen to that of man or woman; which, if the author of a tale I was enjoying appeared, would wish him away that I might return to his story. I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking! “Any man,” I said now, “is more than the greatest of books!” I had not cared for my live brothers and sisters, and now I was left without even the dead to comfort me!”

Mr. Vane realized that the sedentary life cannot truly fill the soul. No matter what high minded thoughts he might think or what wonderful books he might read, if they were not put to a more practical and selfless use they would all be for nothing. To be able to make the nowhere in his soul turn into a beautiful somewhere, he would need to do something. He had become a prisoner by never opening

himself up to the people around him. In this realization, he hits on one of the most important things we can ever learn, that it is only by widening our life to serve another person that our own prison may be expanded, and our own freedom and joy increased.

I think many in our culture today count rules and fences “imposed” on them through a religion, community, or relationship as chains that hold them down. Following thoughts like this wraps us in chains of our own making. With a little thought, we can realize that God gives us rules meant to expand our life and our joy and even our freedom. I personally find that there is no place on earth I would rather be, than in the heaven of my home, with my wife and children. That option is only available to me because I have submitted myself to the “constraints” that allow these circumstances. Committing to a relationship that ties me to only one person intimately. Working to create a stable environment for raising kids. Spending free time doing house projects and taking kids to activities. Those require me to step away from a lot of “freedoms” I could be spending my time on. Though I don’t always succeed at overcoming empty time-wasting temptations, I know that when I do I am opening my life up to more joy in the long run. If you ever feel like you are going nowhere, or that you are already there, I highly recommend seeking to widen your life to prioritize another. In so doing you will open your life to more joy than you can currently imagine, and you will find a freedom that selfishness can never produce.