Why Are You Here? Thoughts Inspired by "The Cafe on the Edge of the World"

This post is inspired by John Strelecky’s 2020 bestseller The Cafe on the Edge of the World: A Story About the Meaning of Life. Fran gifted me a copy for my birthday this year and we read it together. It led to some great conversations and I knew from the start I wanted to write about it. I’ll begin by quoting from the back cover blurb.

In a small cafe at a location so remote it stands in the middle of nowhere, John — a man in a hurry — is at a crossroads. Intent only on refueling before moving along on his road trip, he finds sustenance of an entirely different kind. In addition to the specials of the day, the cafe lists three questions all diners are encouraged to consider:

Why are you here?

Do you fear death?

Are you fulfilled?

The principal characters — naive traveller John, cafe owner Mike, and waitress Casey — reminded me of myself, Ellen, Kai, and their festival food stall in one of my short stories, Home Eleven. Strelecky’s didactic approach and emphasis on finding one’s life purpose recall a former favourite writer of mine; Richard Bach, author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Illusions, and The Bridge Across Forever.

I was less impressed by the writing itself, which in places struck me as awkward and repetitive. (Casey in particular does an awful lot of smiling.) This was perhaps more noticeable because I was reading the story aloud to Fran, rather than silently to myself. Deficiencies aside, we both found it an engaging read. We read the twenty-six short chapters at a rate of one a day. This gave us time to take on board the story as it unfolded and discuss the ideas it engendered. Early on, we asked each other how we’d answer the three questions. Fran went first.

Why are you here?
Because I love you.

Do you fear death?
No because there is no separation. I will live on in people’s hearts.

Are you fulfilled?
At this point in my life, yes. It feels like I stumbled into it, but I’ve done a lot of work to get here.

I’ll explore my answers in more detail below.

Why are you here?

I struggled massively with the first question. I had no idea how to approach it, not least because “Why are you here?” can be interpreted in various ways.

Why am I here (alive) at all?

Why am I still here (still alive)?

Why am I here, in this place at this time, as opposed to being somewhere else at some other point in time?

That last one is interesting given that Fran and I live on opposite sides of the Atlantic, three thousand miles and five timezones apart. We were nonetheless present on our video calls in the same moment, reading the book and pondering the questions it raised. My answers would be: because I am, because I’ve not died yet, because I’m not somewhere or somewhen else. These might seem disappointingly obvious and banal. They would not, I suspect, impress Mike or Casey. “Yes, Marty,” I can imagine them responding (Casey would be smiling). “But why?“ And that’s the sticking point for me. Because to ask why is to seek a purpose or reason. Indeed, the focus of the book is to help us — as Mike and Casey were attempting to help John — to discover and follow our PFE, our Purpose for Existing.

My problem isn’t that I’ve yet to find my PFE, although it’s true I’ve never had one. No purpose. No life plan. No grand path laid out for me to follow. It’s not even that I’ve been too distracted to seek one out. Strelecky makes a big deal of the dangers of losing oneself in the distractions of everyday life. These include marketing and advertising, and the inconvenience of working at any job or task that doesn’t directly serve your PFE. By extension, I suspect he’d include mainstream media, consumerism, western civilisation itself, and the Internet. I dare say I do allow myself to get distracted by these and other things. My main issue, though, is that I don’t believe such existential meaning or purpose exists, for me or anyone else. I’ll come back to this later.

Do you fear death?

Interestingly, the book scarcely touches on the second question, which I find far more straightforward. Of my own inevitable demise, I can answer simply and honestly; no. I might feel differently about it when the time comes but death isn’t something I’m afraid of. I don’t believe in an after-life, heaven or hell, reincarnation, or rebirth. Dying is the end of existing, of being. A dissolving, one might say, of the patterns of energy we embody. That said, the messiness of death unsettles me a great deal. By that I mean both the physical process of dying, especially where it’s protracted or lived in mental or physical pain, but also the societal aftermath of funerals, wills, the distribution and disposal of possessions, our personal legacy and such. It’s an important topic and one I want to explore more fully another time.

Are you fulfilled?

I struggle with this one for different reasons. I don’t recall exactly what I said to Fran but it would have been something along the lines of “if I knew what fulfilled means I’d have a go at answering it!” I wasn’t trying to be evasive. I’ve struggled all my life over the meanings of words, in particular those people use to label their feelings. It’s only recently that I learned there’s a name for this inability to express one’s emotions: alexithymia. If you’re interested to learn more, check out my two blog posts on the topic: How Do I Feel? and How Do I Feel Now?.

I struggle to say whether I’m fulfilled because I’m unsure at what level the question’s being asked. Am I somewhat fulfulled? Mostly? Totally? In this moment? At this phase in my life? Permanently? I’ve certainly felt less than totally fulfilled in the past. I think that’s because I’ve linked fulfillment to identifying and following the kind of life purpose I discussed earlier. If I had no PFE, no ultimate sense of meaning, calling, or vocation, how could I possibly be fulfilled? I see now that this is no less a form of social conditioning than those Strelecky denounces in his book. He decries the idea that we can attain meaning, success, and happiness by blindly following the dictates of consumerism and marketing, but replaces it with his own path to enlightemnent. Find your PFE, he asserts, and you too can be fulfilled. This is what I meant earlier when I said I had issues with the book generally.

In the past, I would have lapped it up as I did others at the time. Nowadays, whilst I concede the wisdom in some of the ideas — it’s valid to question where we are in life, what we want, and how we might move towards those goals — signaling you can do anything you set your mind to if you believe in yourself enough is naive at best. At worst, it’s ableist and stigmatising. I’m reminded of a meme I’ve seen on social media several times. I’ve been unable to trace the original author.

Shout-out to disabled people who aren’t “inspirational”, who are unemployed or stuck with a job they don’t like, who didn’t do well academically and/or had to drop out of school, who aren’t in a position to live and take care of themselves independently even if they would like to, who don’t “just get on with things without complaining”, whose lives didn’t work out in the way they were hoping for, who haven’t “overcome” their disability in the way that society tells us we’re supposed to. You exist, you’re worthwhile and you matter.

I’m not alone in feeling this way, as one Amazon reader makes clear in their review (“A thoughtful read but quite blind to privilege”).

More fundamentally, though, I no longer believe — if I ever truly did — in an ultimate Purpose for Existing for any of us. The very idea is absurd to me, in the sense of the absurdist philosophy of Albert Camus. I’ve explored Camus’ ideas previously in One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy. The universe exists, and we exist within it, devoid of meaning or purpose. And yet, undoubtedly, we are driven to seek both. Books such as The Cafe on the Edge of the World pander to this existential ache without addressing its futility. It’s possible that Strelecky addresses this elsewhere, Cafe being the first of several he’s written to worldwide acclaim. Despite my reservations, this book gave me plenty to think about and I’m grateful to its author and to Fran for bringing it to my attention. In different ways the three questions have helped to clarify my thoughts, beliefs, and feelings about life as I‘m living it.

Why are you here?
To experience the process of living.

Do you fear death?
No.

Are you fulfilled?
My fulfillment is not dependent on identifying my ultimate purpose for existing. There is no such thing. I fill my days, my moments, in ways that are meaningful to me.

I’ll close with a moment of humour that occurred after Fran and I read chapter 15, which describes how advertising tells us we need this and that in order to be happy. “I just need my Marty,” Fran said. I smiled, remembering a recent purchase she’d made. “— and a skort!”

 

The Cafe on the Edge of the World: A Story About the Meaning of Life by John Strelecky is available at Amazon and all good booksellers. For more information, visit the author’s website.

If you’re interested in some of the other books Fran and I have read together, check out It’s Not Just for Kids: Reading Together for Fun and Friendship.

Photo by Shelby Cohron at Unsplash.

 

Up-Blips of Emotion: Exploring the Strange Things That Make My Weird Little Heart Happy

There’s a joke in my family when talking about treating oneself to something: “You’ve got to have some pleasure in life!” The required response, of course, is “You don’t have enough pleasure already?!” I was thinking about this the other day after posting my piece on loneliness for Mental Health Awareness Week. In the article I explored Mark Rowland’s notion that we feel lonely when there’s a mismatch between the connections we have and our social needs and wants. If that’s true, I wondered, what about our other needs? What do we feel when those go unmet? Sad? Angry? Frustrated? Empty? Unhappy?

More generally, why do we find some activities and experiences pleasurable and not others? Why do we yearn for happiness and pleasure? What does it mean to be happy, anyway? What about all the times we’re not happy? Do they have value too, or are they merely to be lived though until our next fix of happiness? What’s the point of being happy if you’re only going to be not-happy again afterwards? I was tangled up in these thoughts when I came across a quotation by American journalist and author Elizabeth Gilbert.

Don’t ever be ashamed of loving the strange things that make your weird little heart happy.

It brought a smile to my face, not least because I’m almost certainly overthinking things! I’m not sure pleasure and happiness are meant to be rationalised to this extent. Analysing — over-analysing — is something I do, and on the whole I’m okay with that. But it can be good to just let things happen without trying to figure them out logically. I shared the Elizabeth Gilbert quotation with my friend Brynn. We agreed there’s a lot of social pressure to be happy, or at least to present as being happy, despite the fact it’s not possible to be happy all the time. She observed that connecting with people seems to make me happy. I didn’t disagree, although I wasn't sure it was quite the right word for how good connections make me feel.

What else makes you happy, Marty?

I thought a moment before answering.

Hmmm. I’m not sure. I don’t know that I’m “happy” very often. I don’t mean I’m flat or low all the time, although I do get that way sometimes. I’d mostly describe my good times as feeling positive or engaged, rather than “happy.”

So you don’t consider yourself a happy person?

No.

I know how you feel. I have moments of happiness but in general I’m not a happy person either.

I don’t see it as a negative thing or an issue.

Me neither. It is what it is.

Happiness is just a word and different people will use it in different ways. What I call being positive or engaged, someone else might call happiness. Semantics aside, I’ve always been suspicious of the need to be happy because to me it’s a fleeting, or at least a temporary, state. I’ve enjoyed many moments of happiness, but the longer term has always seemed more important to me. For much of my life that long-term state has been wholesome and positive. Maybe that’s why I’ve not felt the need to pursue those up-blips of emotion called happiness: if and when they came along, it was a bonus. The icing on the cake. That all changed last year, when I became aware of a significant downward shift in my baseline mood.

I’ve always believed my emotional and mental health baseline to be essentially positive and healthy. Things might happen at times to upset my equilibrium, but after a shorter or longer period I return to my place of stability and wholeness. Lately, though, this model has been turned on its head. Instead of events and situations disturbing me from an essentially healthy baseline, it feels as though my baseline itself has shifted downwards. Positive events and situations such as meeting up with a friend, or feedback on one of my blog posts [...] can lift me up, lighten my mood, or provide an alternative focus for a while. But, once the distraction has passed, I’m pulled back to this low mood baseline.

Things that used to bring me pleasure seem less worth pursuing now. What’s the point, I find myself asking, when I’ll return to that lower mood afterwards? I used to take myself into Newcastle City centre almost every Saturday. I’d visit my then favourite coffee shop for an hour or so, then wander round the shops, calling in at the art gallery or museum, or perhaps venture down to the quayside. I stopped doing all that due to covid, but even though restrictions have lifted, I’ve felt little urge to return. I’ve been into Newcastle twice this year to meet up with friends, but have had no interest in exploring on my own as I used to.

Instead, I spend Saturday mornings in my local Costa coffee shop, writing, then head home for the rest of the day. There’s nothing wrong with changing my habits and patterns, and I look forward to “coffee and scribbles” at Costa. It’s become the highlight of my week. My “happy place.” What’s arguably unhealthy is that I have little to no desire to explore or plan other things. That “what’s the point?” is not a good sign.

What is the point, though? It sometimes feels as though “doing happy things” is little more than a distraction from however else I’m feeling or whatever else is going on for me. This is something I’ve discussed many times in conversations with Fran and other friends. If we’re feeling low, sad, or depresed; if we’re going through hard times of any description, why wouldn’t we want to distract ourselves or escape into moments of happiness — whatever happy might mean to us. I’m reminded of the words of author J. R. R. Tolkien, in response to the accusation that literary fantasy (which he refers to as fairy-stories) is an escape from reality.

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used [...] Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter. (J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy Stories)

Thinking about it in this way, maybe the point of happiness is precisely to provide temporary relief or escape from whatever else is going on for us. Both Tolkien and Gilbert suggest there’s nothing weak or shameful in this. I needn’t worry, then, that doing things that bring me pleasure provides only temporary distraction.

That word temporary is important. Happiness can take us out of our present situation for a while and allow us to recharge our physical, mental, and emotional batteries. I’ve shared some of my distraction techniques previously, in posts such as Ten Ways to Turn a Bad Day Around, Nine Ways I Distract Myself When I'm Feeling Down, and Notes for a Happy Life. However, it’s not — and must not become — an excuse or strategy to ignore or avoid our problems.

Gilbert’s choice of words — her strange things and weird little heart — reminds us that happiness is intensely individual. The things that lift my heart may be very different to the things that lift yours. And that’s okay. So, what strange things make my weird little heart happy? Let’s start with some things I enjoy doing.

• Writing on good quality paper with a fountain pen with an extra fine nib.
• Sending my friends a good morning message.
• Setting out my writing station — phone and tablet on their little stands, keyboard, notebooks and pens — in my local coffee shop as I settle in for some quality me time.
• Working creatively in my Traveler’s Notebook.
• Completing the draft version of whatever blog post I’m working on.

Those all bring me pleasure, but I wouldn’t say they make me happy. They’re things I can consciously choose or decide to do. My happy moments are far fewer in number and much less frequent. They are also unplanned. Unpredictability is an important aspect of true happiness for me. To misappropriate the words of Tolkien’s Oxford contemporary C. S. Lewis, happiness for me means being surprised by joy. Unexpected feedback on my blog posts or books, especially where it’s clear they’ve had a significant impact on the reader; news of a friend’s achievements or success; unanticipated hugs; crowd karaoke — these are a few of my favourite happy things. (That last one is a few year’s old now, but it’s still the first thing I think of when I think of happy!)

Where does all this this bring me? If true happiness isn’t something I can plan for or anticipate, maybe the best I can do is hold myself open to its appearance and appreciate it when it occurs. More practically, I can build more opportunities for pleasure and meaning in my life, and embrace “distractions” without feeling as though they’re a waste of time, focus, and energy. What’s the point? may be the ultimate unanswerable question, but maybe asking it is answer enough.

After all, you’ve got to have some pleasure in life, right?

Over to You

I’ve shared a few thoughts and ideas about happiness, but what does it mean to you? What makes you happy? Would you call yourself a happy person? If not, do you wish you were? When was the last time you were truly happy? We’d love to hear from you, either in the comments below or via our contact page.

If you’re interested in further musings on the Elizabeth Gilbert quotation, check out this post by Ella at LaWhimsy.

 

Photo by Stan B at Unsplash.