Creating purpose and intensity in life

[coberst]

Creating purpose and intensity in life

I visited a cemetery once and remember this sentiment “She Lived Life with Intensity” engraved on a head stone. It has an appeal to most citizens but I suspect there would be many different interpretations for its meaning.

What does it mean to ‘live life with intensity’? I suspect most would judge that money is the key to such a life. I think that money is the key to comfort, which is not a key that would fit the lock on a ‘life lived with intensity’. I suspect that wealth is often the death of ‘life lived with intensity’.

I will have to recognize at least one exception to this and that is George Soros. George Soros is both rags to riches--fantastic riches in a domain of finance that he alone began--and an individual with a highly developed intellectual life. I read a book about him and also one by him and I find him a model of one who has lived life with intensity.

I think that developing an intellectual life through a self-actualizing self-learning process is the means to a ‘life lived with intensity’. I am convinced that Soros philosopher/tycoon followed that process.

What does this cryptic message “She Lived Life with Intensity” mean to you?

A dilettante just dabbles at this and that never doing anything with intensity. Intensity is living life with some degree of disinterested passion. Disinterested passion is gusto with small regard to self aggrandizement. A person who has developed their own intellectual sophistication lives a life of passion and depth that few others can even recognize. Carl Sagan said “Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.” Carl knew what living with intensity is all about. It is about billions and billions while others live with thousands and thousands.

This quotation of Carl Rogers might illuminate my meaning of disinterested knowledge.

“I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!"