Despair, pattern, and kindness
A despair hits me the moment my thoughts stir at the start of most days, a single question fretted with doubt and weariness: Why get up? My eyes remain closed. Sometimes I shift my weight. I feel powerless to cut the question short or dodge its insistence, as if it holds me to mattress.
I know what I'm really asking: Why not give up? Why do I keep getting up each day? Already resolved to live out my life to its natural conclusion, I wonder why I choose life over death--why anyone does--when the prospect of silence can seem so sweet. Most days, I think it's autopilot, and the question reveals a painful reality that autopilot ignores: our lives subsist on the frailest of means.
Besides of our religion, our careers, our families, our morality, our love affair with hope--besides certain powerful interactions beyond ourselves--few reasons to live exist. Thus, we're caught in a paradox. Our lives are meaningless except when framed within other contexts beyond our own subjective experience of life--our thoughts, our birth, our daily maintenance of biological life, our death. In other words, if we woke up each morning without family or religion, life wouldn't be painful, it would be numb, devoid of purpose or direction. This in itself is a form of pain, but it differs from the pain of someone suffering from a debilitating disease. It is a pain formed from weariness and loss.
This makes perfect freedom a terrible reality. Liberated from a God or the responsibilities of family, despair comes naturally. Left to himself, a man has nothing to live for besides his own self improvement, which would be fine, if humans weren't such social creatures. But we are. We biologically require connections beyond ourselves.
Yet such connections lie beyond our full control. So when they fracture, as in a broken relationship, we hit the raw reality of despair. We lose our orbit, cast into the black abyss of space. Our routine shatters, leaving us with nothing but the empty gulf of what was once there but is no more--we hit the underpinning of our individual existence. We lose our autopilot.
I ask myself why I fight. Why I continue to live out days steeped in the same despair and angst. I never find an answer. Instead, I lose myself in the pattern of my life, a pattern arrayed to defend me from such dangerous questions. I have to limit my scope to be happy. Looking beyond the bounds of the "norm," daring to desire something beyond the regular patterns framed by society, only leads to nausea, a sickness derived from life's sheer futility.
Think of all the meaningless connections in our lives, the meaningless behaviors, the meaningless accumulation of memory and experience, the meaningless appraisal of quality, and one will despair. It is inevitable. We are a lonely, tortured race, trying to force a purpose onto a process that other animals take up without question. Perhaps they have more wisdom than we. They escape the burden of realizing their own freedom by living it unacknowledged.
I finally open my eyes, look at my dark room, rise to brush my teeth, slipping into the superficial pattern of my life. Gradually the questions drift away. I lose myself to my work. I lose myself to my conversations and friendships, until the insistent voice of despair and freedom softens to a whisper. Perhaps I'm running, but I don't care. I join the mass of crowds adrift in their own patterns, like some jagged, disordered tapestry. None of us realize we are really loose threads.
This is why I'm kind to others, why I forgive. I'm humbled into softness because it's so damn hard to be human.
I know what I'm really asking: Why not give up? Why do I keep getting up each day? Already resolved to live out my life to its natural conclusion, I wonder why I choose life over death--why anyone does--when the prospect of silence can seem so sweet. Most days, I think it's autopilot, and the question reveals a painful reality that autopilot ignores: our lives subsist on the frailest of means.
Besides of our religion, our careers, our families, our morality, our love affair with hope--besides certain powerful interactions beyond ourselves--few reasons to live exist. Thus, we're caught in a paradox. Our lives are meaningless except when framed within other contexts beyond our own subjective experience of life--our thoughts, our birth, our daily maintenance of biological life, our death. In other words, if we woke up each morning without family or religion, life wouldn't be painful, it would be numb, devoid of purpose or direction. This in itself is a form of pain, but it differs from the pain of someone suffering from a debilitating disease. It is a pain formed from weariness and loss.
This makes perfect freedom a terrible reality. Liberated from a God or the responsibilities of family, despair comes naturally. Left to himself, a man has nothing to live for besides his own self improvement, which would be fine, if humans weren't such social creatures. But we are. We biologically require connections beyond ourselves.
Yet such connections lie beyond our full control. So when they fracture, as in a broken relationship, we hit the raw reality of despair. We lose our orbit, cast into the black abyss of space. Our routine shatters, leaving us with nothing but the empty gulf of what was once there but is no more--we hit the underpinning of our individual existence. We lose our autopilot.
I ask myself why I fight. Why I continue to live out days steeped in the same despair and angst. I never find an answer. Instead, I lose myself in the pattern of my life, a pattern arrayed to defend me from such dangerous questions. I have to limit my scope to be happy. Looking beyond the bounds of the "norm," daring to desire something beyond the regular patterns framed by society, only leads to nausea, a sickness derived from life's sheer futility.
Think of all the meaningless connections in our lives, the meaningless behaviors, the meaningless accumulation of memory and experience, the meaningless appraisal of quality, and one will despair. It is inevitable. We are a lonely, tortured race, trying to force a purpose onto a process that other animals take up without question. Perhaps they have more wisdom than we. They escape the burden of realizing their own freedom by living it unacknowledged.
I finally open my eyes, look at my dark room, rise to brush my teeth, slipping into the superficial pattern of my life. Gradually the questions drift away. I lose myself to my work. I lose myself to my conversations and friendships, until the insistent voice of despair and freedom softens to a whisper. Perhaps I'm running, but I don't care. I join the mass of crowds adrift in their own patterns, like some jagged, disordered tapestry. None of us realize we are really loose threads.
This is why I'm kind to others, why I forgive. I'm humbled into softness because it's so damn hard to be human.