Last week, I read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha for the second time in my life. I read this book—my favorite book of all time—all the way back in 2010, right before starting my senior year of high school. Since then, I’ve reread bits and pieces of it, especially the last chapter, which is my favorite chapter ever. But I never reread it all the way through. Until last week. And I needed it.
I graduated from college in May, nearly 5 years after reading Siddhartha for the first time. That book changed my life the first time I read it. It made me want more out of life. I didn’t want to just be boring or average. I wanted to experience greatness and enlightenment, the way the titular character Siddhartha did in the novel.
But I lost my way over the past five years. I became more engrossed in the world, in the pleasures of life, in food and drink and women and the whole meaningless nausea of it all. I became lost and confused and uncertain. I experienced sadness, rejection, compete and utter failure. I lost not one, not two, but three loved ones, after having gone practically my entire life without ever experiencing loss.
And despite all of that, I still experienced pleasure. I had fun. I partied hard. I made the best friends ever. I met the coolest people in the world. I had a ton of great experiences. But the pain still cut deep. I couldn’t fully overcome it. Complete pleasure and complete pain at the same time. It was brutal and joyous at the same time.
That’s the experience of life. You take the good with the bad. But I still feel like I lost my way. Five years ago, I read Siddhartha and I considered myself destined for enlightenment, greatness, and an absolutely extraordinary life. But something happened
Life got in the way. The way it did for Siddhartha. The boy grew up with the brahmins and later spent time with the ascetics. But he gave it all up to go into the world. And experience love and pleasure. To make money, to eat heartily, and to drink merrily. And to also experience pain, heartbreak, and suffering. To lose money. To get fat and sick from his eating and drinking. The full range of human emotions. He experienced it all. I experienced it all. We both lost our ways.
That’s why I had to reread Siddhartha. Because I lost my way. Because Siddhartha also lost his way. He lost it for decades. But he found it again. He was born again. He found enlightenment in the end. And here’s the crazy part about all of that: he didn’t consider his earlier days to be a waste.
He spent 18 years studying to be a brahmin, but never became one. He spent 3 years with the ascetics and never got anything out of it. He spent decades as a wealthy merchant’s right-hand man. He experienced success and made tons of money. But he left it all behind, giving up the money, the fame, the prestige. He spent decades knowing and loving a beautiful woman, yet he gave it all up, including the son they had together. All those years wasted…or so it seems.
But to Siddhartha, it wasn’t a waste. He needed every single one of those experiences. He had to spend years learning under the brahmins, the ascetics, and even the Buddha himself to finally realize that he had to abandon teachers and the whole concept of seeking if he wanted to experience enlightenment. He had to learn the pleasures of the world from his lover and the wealthy merchant in order to experience the nausea and dissatisfaction that led to ultimately find pleasure in even the simplest of things, like the river that finally helps him achieve enlightenment. Every experience was important to him.
He just didn’t realize it until the very end, when he finally achieved enlightenment. Then he got clarity and he could finally see how everything connected. He had to have all of those experiences. Every single thing he did played a role in his enlightenment. Hesse’s novel has taught me a million things over the past 5 years, but this is perhaps the greatest lesson of them all. Life is about the totality of experience. Everything matters. Nothing is a waste. As Steve Jobs once said in his now famous graduation speech, “You can’t connect the dots going forward.” You can only connect the dots going background.
So the real question is this: “Do you have the patience.” The patience to wait for the mud to settle and the water to clear. And do you have the persistence to keep going? Do you have the resilience to break through all the pain, the nausea, the dissatisfaction? Do you have the fortitude to not succumb to the pleasures of the world? You have to be strong. Be patient. Be persistent and resilient. Fight through it all. If you can do that, you will be rewarded in the end.
Like Siddhartha was. It took him a long time, but it was worth it. Every experience mattered. Life is long, it’s difficult, it will test you like nothing else. You need to persist, you need to fight, you need to remain patient. And remember that life is about the totality of experience. Nothing is a waste. Nothing was a waste to Siddhartha.
That’s why I’m so glad I reread the book. After all the seemingly pointless pain and pleasure I’ve experienced since I first read the book, it was great to realize that everything really mattered. I was starting to question my life. To question the pointlessness of it all. To answer that age old question, “What is the meaning of life?”, with the simple answer, “Nothing”.
But life does have meaning. It means whatever you want it to mean. You have a choice. I have a choice. Siddhartha had a choice. He chose love. As he tells his lifelong friend Govinda in the final chapter,
“It seems to me that Love is the most important thing in the world. It may be important to great thinkers to examine the world, to explain and despise it. But I think it is only important to love the world, not to despise it, not for us to hate each other, but to be able to regard the world and ourselves and all beings with love, admiration and respect.”
This, is what Siddhartha believes is the meaning of life. He says we should look at all things with love because that is the most important thing. I agree with Siddhartha. You don’t have to. Life is what you make it. You don’t have to follow someone else. I choose to follow Siddhartha because Love is very important to me.
It may or not be important to you. But something is important to you. It might be friendship, travel, great experiences, romance, children, legacy, impact, power, or any number of other possibilities. Life does have meaning. It’s what you make of it.
And it’s determined by the totality of experiences. Siddhartha’s experiences—however meaningless they might seem—determined his life’s meaning. Your experiences will determine your life’s meaning.
So go forth. Find your meaning. Experience everything. It will be worth it in the end.