Now What?

It always comes down to that question. Time and again. You try to find something, anything to take your mind off of it. You try to find answers to it by trying to immerse yourself in some new activity, taking up a new job or changing your vocation. Or maybe you develop new hobbies or polish existing ones. Or you might sign up for new courses to augment your skill-sets for an ever-changing dynamic world. Or maybe you travel to some fancy exotic place to “get away from it all” and soothe yourself through the envy and adulation of others through broadcasting your geographic exploits on Social-Media. But it always circles back to the same damn thing. And even when you are “well occupied”, there’s a part of your consciousness that’s being itched and lacerated in the background by that singular question: “Now what? … Where do I go from here?”

For some, this question comes up once a few months. For others, once a few years. And for those of us who are wracked with a chronic baseline level of restless anxiety, this question is always ever-present — at the back of our minds, lurking in the existential shadows of our consciousness. There’s no getting away from it. All you can do is deflect. Temporarily. An idle mind isn’t the devil’s workshop. Rather, it’s a fertile playground for existential angst.

No matter what you do or not do, no matter what you might have achieved or the odds you may have surmounted, it’s only a matter of time before that question comes roaring back into your life like an eighteen-wheeler barreling down a highway. It’s not a question of if, but when. And when it comes, it has an uncanny ability to puncture you flat and then make you scurry around for something, anything — to get away from it. And then on you go embarking on “the next chapter/episode of your life” — a euphemism which translates to getting up all dazed after being KO’d in the boxing-ring and then soldiering on for the next round, knowing full well that it’s only a matter of time before you get your ass pinned to the ground again — by life, by circumstances, by the numbing drudgery of the mundane, by the banalities of an insipid routine, by the robotic repetition and seeming futility of it all.

And by that age-old question that inevitably throws your life back into chaos every now and then … Q: “Now What? What do I do?”… A: “Now, Fight Inertia. Resist Chaos. Overturn Entropy. Keep Futility at bay. At least temporarily. Then … Rinse. Repeat.”

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