A Sniper's Perspective On Meaning

Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä and attunement with nature

Thinker. Navy SEAL. Dispatches on meaning and hardship. Also figs and dogs.

The Destruction of Pompei and Herculaneum. John Martin. 1822.

Welcome back to What then?

Today’s piece grapples with a fundamentally human—and crucial—problem at present: how we can reverse engineer an ancient form of meaning through contact with nature.

On! On!

Worst-case scenarios, like war and disaster, often lead to attention so profound our lives are filled with meaning. And yet the same attention and meaning is tellingly absent in the best-case scenarios of peace and safety. Why can the same intensity of attention not be earned without the worst-case? Why can the same explosive sense of meaning be earned without the risk of a bullet or a mudslide?

The answer is it can.

For all the wonder and gratitude civilization deserves, it is even more amazing that when meaning lies within a hand’s reach, it is often sacrificed for a purposeless drift. Civilization poses us an unprecedented challenge—the art of bringing worst-case meaning to a best-case world.

Let us take the case of the deadliest sniper in history.

I read the Winter Warriors about the Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä.¹ Nowhere is universal human nature more clearly seen than in the universality of war. All those who stalked the Fertile Crescent ten thousand years ago share a kindship with Simo, as well as those non-drone operators low crawling through woodlands with ghillie suits and long guns in Ukraine. Simo, however, killed over five hundred Soviet snipers over a three month period when Russia invaded Finland in 1939. For a sniper, this is an incomprehensible level of combat experience. For a human, this is access to an incomprehensible level of wisdom.

In –4º F your breath creates a cloud of vapor so thick an enemy combatant can see it from hundreds of meters away. One mere exhale is a neon colored billboard dominating a highway. It is a target that screams “Shoot me! Shoot me!” Simo became a student of observation, and this observation revealed a world exploding with meaning. Meaning in vapor, shadows, and shifting shades of white on white. Meaning in the subtle undulations of micro terrain, the wind, and the effect of a cold barrel on the flight of a bullet. Simo shot and killed a Russian sniper through a snow mound without ever seeing him—all he needed to see was a bit of breath rising above the mound. “Every mistake the enemy made was a lesson for the young soldier. After this, Simo made small snowballs that he put in his mouth and allowed to melt so that his position would not be betrayed by his warm breath.”

I am left with a few thoughts centered around earning a similar sense of attention and meaning in peace and safety.

All of them are grounded in our relationship to nature.

Attunement means “to bring into harmony.” Who, then, is brought into harmony? We are. And what are we brought into harmony with? As a sniper, we know what it is to have an enemy. We know the hunt. We know the air gently brushing against the upper portion of our nostrils slowly decreases our heart rate, and how at the bottom of our exhale the intervals between our heart beats expand to such a degree we can squeeze the trigger in that measureless—almost divine—pause for one perfectly steady shot. The threat of nonexistence leads to an extraordinary level of attunement to existence: to every minuscule experience, even those we think of as throwaway experiences, woven through the mosaic that is life.

As a former sniper, it took me years to unriddle this primal truth: the enemy sniper promising death leads us to meaning, and this meaning leads us to attunement—and this ancient equation works both ways. By practicing attunement in a world without mortal threats, we find meaning. Let us become a Walker. On a single walk we might see the turquoise tinted neck of the common grackle as it baths on the rim of the lake. Or the fish playing beneath the surface creating ripples in the water that look like upside down raindrops. Or the micro-movement of an eyelid or a lip of the person beside us, the emotion they electrify a particular word with, and the life-force animating every aspect of their being. Or we stop to savor our mutts rolling on their backs with their hooves in the air happy to be alive and not giving a damn about anything else. Human meaning is manifest in the granular details of nature.

So much for the groundedness of walking.

Now what of the elevation of sprinting?

I sprint hills several days a week. I love hill sprints. Savage and slippery red ochre hills in a thunderstorm. Loose gravel roads in ninety degree heat and ninety percent humidity. Steep dirt trails with swerves and roots and rocks which will take a tooth if we are not mindful. I cannot imagine a more functional or primeval movement than a hill sprint, or even just walking vigorously up a steep road or set of stairs.

We respond to a hill as naturally as a knife in a sheath. But the benefit to our body is irrelevant compared to the impact our body has on our minds. When we push our bodies outdoors under the sun or snow or sleet, we look down at things that would typically gnaw at us like emails, calls, texts, and calendar notifications. We look out at things that are easy to overlook, like the taste of a single cold red raspberry. We look in at the visions and voices in our skull and find a sense of calm and command. And we look up at the expanse of the universe and understand just how small and yet immense our little lives actually are.

It is striking to let these thoughts sink in at the top of a hill. We wonder how much of existence we would not see if we did not suffer voluntarily on a daily basis. How little meaning we would not have if we were slope shouldered over a phone, in a windowless office building, or obsessed with an ungrounded academic ideology.

It is significant meaning is not the product of worst-case scenarios, but of how the individual responds to the worst-case scenario. Warriors like Simo despise the death war brings. And yet it is death that makes the full value of life so clear. When our death is a few seconds away it becomes as a mirror. It shows us, without mercy, how we have chosen to live up to that precise second in time. It therefore offers us a chance at a rebirth, a self-written recreation of ourselves.

So what is significant about snowballs? Simo putting a snowball in his mouth is an irrelevant ritual in peace, but a lifesaving ritual in War. It is striking how many daily rituals are not treated with the same intensity—as if they were not as mortally serious. Will we, too, not die? Will we not find a bizarrely fast bullet in war or the slow grind of senescence in peace? Another question may be asked: Is a single second of life in peace worth less than a single second of life in war? Then why would anyone let it drift by unlived? If a snowball can be a ritual, why would a walk with sun on the skin in the morning not be? Or a paperback book that smells like an old library? Or studying the patterns in the veins of a fig leaf, the same patterns that are then seen everywhere: in a moth’s wing, the hair of a child, the beard of a dog, the maze of maple branches against the sky, or the constellations of our Milky Way?

It is clear meaning-through-attunement can be found without life-or-death challenges. It is possible to build a meaningful life by choice, rather than by force; with a walk and a hill, rather than a bullet. But it is also clear it disappears all too easily. Thus meaning is now a discipline, a choice made not once, but every moment of our lives.

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Εἰς μελέτην

For meditation

1. Thank you Marshall R Peterson for the book