"In French, they have an expression: crème de la crème. ... The cream of the cream. It means the best of the best. The most important essence of life—that’s the crème de la crème. Get it? The rest is just boring and worthless." -- First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami
Crème de la crème is quoted from Haruki Murakami's short novel First Person Singular. The full story drags one into Murakami's typically weird weird (in a good sense) world: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/28/cream
However, today we are not going to talk about the story. We will be delving into the topic of the essence of life, that is, or as Murakami called it, the crème de la crème.
Here is an overview of today's discussion:
- What would you say is the essence of life or 'the cream of the cream'?
- Is it the 'cream of the cream' really the thing that makes our life good?
- What constitutes a good life? What are the elements?
- How does one approach creating a good life? Does it take time to learn? How do you learn it and where do you learn from?
To spark some ideas, we found some extra materials:
⭐️Ted Talk: There's more to life than being happy
As our society becomes obsessed with chasing happiness in life, Writer Smith suggests that having meaning in life--serving something beyond yourself and developing the best within you--leads us on a more fulfilling path. She offers four pillars for building a meaningful life: belonging, purpose, transcendence and storytelling.
The four pillars defined by Smith:
Belonging → comes from being in relationships where you're valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well
Purpose→ using your strength to serve others
Transcendence→ Stepping beyond yourself. You are lifted above the daily hustle and bustle. Your sense of self fades away. You feel connected to a higher reality. Some describe transcendence happening when they are looking at art, at church, or writing.
Storytelling→ Creating a narrative from the events happening around you brings clarity. It helps you know how you become you. Reflecting on your life thoughtfully, how you define experience, what you lost and gained. Embracing painful memories can lead us to new insight and wisdom.
⭐️The second thing comes from a conversation I had with Angela as we were developing this topic. She made an analogy between making a good painting and living a good life. Here is the text:
When you make a painting, you consider things on several levels.
You think about what you want to paint, and you think about how to paint it, and you think about the feeling you want to come from it. Sometimes this isn’t really a conscious process, but I believe you always do these things.
My teacher once said that while working on a picture you only focus on the technique of it, but it's when you are done that you allow yourself to reflect on its meanings and themes, its relationship to the rest of your work, and whether it’s good enough for you or not.
So to begin with there’s the actual picture, and the feeling you have while making it, the satisfaction of producing it, the thoughts that go through your head while you’re in process.
Then there’s the result, when the painting is finally complete: The material reality of it changes your reality once it exists.
The material reality includes: the space it takes up, the feelings it makes people feel, how it may change your relationship to people (because their feelings may change toward you after it exists), how it may change your relationship to yourself (your sense of achievement or worthlessness, depending), the money it may eventually be worth (which also may change your relationship to people), all of these things.
If you think about the painting as a metaphor for your life, there’s the feelings you have as you’re in the middle of doing what you do and the thoughts you have as you do the thing. And then there’s the result of your labor, what it means to you, how it relates to the rest of your life and work, what it means to other people, how what you do makes you feel and makes others feel, how it changes your relationship to them because of what you do.
