“I guess there’s more to life than baseball.” That was my older brother’s conclusion after the coach at his small college cut him from the team. My father thought it was rather funny that he was just now coming to this realization. My 10-year-old self was horrified. If my star-athlete brother hadn’t made his college baseball team, there was absolutely no hope for a middling player like me. And how on earth could there be more to life than baseball?
Figuring out what’s important in life is not for the faint of heart. I imagine that most of us can remember a time when we discovered, sometimes painfully, that there was more to life than, well, whatever it was that we thought there wasn’t more to life than. And while we can always learn this from experience, it’d sure be nice to have a little help along the way.
So, forget the self-help books of today. Let’s go back some 3,000 years to the world’s original self-help texts, to what’s usually called the “wisdom literature” of the ancient Middle East. You find it in ancient Mesopotamia, in ancient Egypt, and even in certain biblical books like Proverbs. A few scholars now argue that we should stop calling it “wisdom literature,” mainly because my field has its own issues figuring out what’s important in life, but whatever you call it, this literature tries to offer advice on how to pay attention to the stuff in life that really matters.
One of its favorite things to say is that there is more to life than wealth. For example, the Egyptian “Instructions of Amenemope” say not to “cast your heart away in pursuit of riches . . . for they will make themselves wings like geese and fly away to the heavens.” In the book of Proverbs you find, “Don’t struggle to gain wealth . . . You might see it, but then it’s gone. It sprouts wings and flies away like an eagle into the sky.” I admit I’ve never actually seen my money fly off above me, though; I find it just sneaks out the back door when I’m not looking.
The false allure of material success shows up in ancient stories as well. Take the biblical character of Jacob, a major figure in the narratives of Genesis. He knows what he wants out of life and is determined to get it. If you know the stories, then you know that he gets the inheritance he wants, the fatherly blessing he wants, the woman he wants, the children he wants, the security he wants, and all the wealth he could possibly want. When he’s old, he moves to Egypt to be near his favorite son. At the ripe old age of 130, he has an audience with the Egyptian king, who asks Jacob about his life. “The years of my life have been few and hard,” he says. That’s not at all what you expect him to say. I wonder how someone like him would fill in the blank: “There’s more to life than _________________.”
In the end we all have to decide for ourselves what there isn’t more to life than. But here’s what I can tell you. Stories like Jacob’s can help, and even some of those pithy sayings from that formerly-known-as-wisdom-literature literature — and meeting people that are like Jacob or maybe a little like Jacob or not like Jacob at all. Stories and people. And experience and history and poetry and art and a little philosophy and maybe a few more pithy sayings.
I think the stories are the best. They don’t offer us concrete answers so much as an array of insights into what might be important in these lives we lead. From the ancient Middle East to our own modern time we have loads of stories, fictional and factual, about all kinds of different people. A lot of them are sad because — not to put too fine a point on it — our ilk has never been great at figuring this out. But many of them have happy endings, where people zero in on what really matters and live meaningful lives in accordance thereto. The more stories we read, the better our chances of getting it right.
Now if I could find a place not too far away that would let a bespectacled middle-aged man play a little baseball, I could finally put paid to the notion that my brother had any idea what he was talking about.
Bruce Wells is an associate professor of Middle Eastern studies at The University of Texas at Austin where he specializes in the study of the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East.