By Engr. Carlos V. Cornejo
This is based on a TED talk given by Dr. Shimi Kang, a psychologist and Director of Youth and Child Life in Canada. She claims that the one skill that will give us meaning, purpose, passion and joy in life is adaptability. Adaptability for her is expressed in three activities as she would narrate it in detail in her book “The Dolphin’s Way”. These three activities of Play, Others, and Downtime or POD in short, comes from observing how dolphins live a happy life by being playful without rules, how they connect with other dolphins, and how they rest and relax during their downtime. This article is a critic of her claim. I disagree with her one skill “panacea” or the “cure for all” as adaptability. Adaptability is a great virtue to practice when undergoing big changes in our life, but it’s not the be all and end all virtue or the most important virtue. The be all and end all virtue is love or to be a person of love or to be a saint which is the same thing and not adaptability.
The one skill that give us meaning, purpose, passion and joy in life is not adaptability but striving for sanctity or trying to become a saint. It is not actually a skill but a way of life or a relationship, a relationship with God. This is not my personal claim but God’s. Christ said it in the Gospel of St. Luke that this is the “one thing necessary” (Luke 10:42). It’s the summary of God’s commandments for us “Be holy for I am holy.” (1 Peter 1:16)
If we strive to be holy, then all the good things that we are supposed to do in this life would become clear. It’s like falling in love, everything would change in our life if we fall in love. That’s why another way of answering the question, “What is the meaning of life?” aside from striving to be holy is to love. Because trying to become a saint and to be a person of love are one and the same thing. Another summary of the commandments aside from trying to be holy as Christ gave it to us is to love God with all our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. (Mt 22:37-39) And that makes love the be all and end all virtue not adaptability.
If we resolve to become a saint, then trying to practice the virtues of humility, honesty, compassion, fairness, generosity, self-giving, charity, etc., would naturally follow. The same thing with going to Mass more often, or going to confession regularly, or be more prayerful because the saints that we venerate in the altars have already shown these practices to us such as our Filipino saints: St. Pedro Calungsod, St. Lorenzo Ruiz and Venerable Teofilo Camomot. They have led the way. We are not in need of more role models but more of applying what our role models have already done and proven to be “the one thing necessary”. Then meaning, purpose, joy and peace would just then follow in our lives if we just follow what God had been telling us in Scripture and through the teachings of the Church.
The problem with pop psychologists such as Dr. Kang in the Western countries is that they try to teach us the ultimate solution to our stress, problems, and the so-called answer to the meaning of life, by following fad practices such as adaptability, but when you try it out, you still end up feeling empty. They don’t want to try out the spiritual solution because the “God solution” would mean giving up their immoral or sinful practices which is the root of what makes them stressful and miserable in the first place anyway. It’s not addressing the obvious or the elephant in the room, when it’s only the Creator who can fix the woes of the creature because it’s only the inventor (God) who knows how to make the invented (man) function well according to its purpose.
