Yesterday I caught my reflection in the sink as I reached in to begin washing my dishes. What was there? Me. As I looked away and began the task at hand, my mind drifted back in time. Childhood, young adulthood, and recent events were there in my memory to be viewed like a slide show. The emotions accompanied the visions of times passed, providing undue context to a life that is objectively mundane and still an artful work in progress. As I write, the calming melody of “Get Together” by the Youngbloods graces my ears and tempers the blade of intense emotions as they swell. Anger, anguish, sorrow, elation, confusion, and my friend melancholy file through the corridor of my recollections silently for once. They are there, and that is all, they are finally doing their job.
Lately I’ve given a considerable amount of time to pondering who I am. I feel that I’ve never been closer to whole. I feel that my identity, aye, my authentic self is in sight. I now live mostly in a way that is in alignment with my core values, the only outlier being my indulgences in instant pleasures be it fast food, chatting on dating sites, a cold beer, or loud music. Who am I? Me. I’m a kind, protective, analytical, diligent and pragmatic man with a thirst for adventure and an apparent knack for the written word. So why showcase my mundane musings here? Simple, this is my journal and my intellectual gymnasium. I challenge my own thoughts and feelings by sharing them with you who grace me with your time and readership.
The night before last, the existential question arose in a conversation with my neighbor turned friend, and my evening date, and for the first time in my life I heard myself give an answer out loud. The irony, as I described it to my date later, is that the book that plagued me with the question and the book that answered it were both written by the same man, The late great Albert Camus, The veritable godfather of existentialism. In life, we are in the eternal now, and alone. We are meaningless beneath the stars in the vastness of space. The universe can’t even see us. There is no motive or meaning to our being other than what we create. That is the answer. We create our own meaning. We as individual souls, in order to grapple with the futility of existence and the beautiful curse of consciousness, must conjure and carve a purpose out for ourselves from what we see and what we are given. Someday, we will all be rendered inert, it’s an inevitable stage in the cycle of life that exists solely on this planet as we know it, and worrying about the end is as futile an exercise as life itself, if it were such.
When we give in to the marauding terror of our inevitable demise, we give away our souls; we lose our fire. In Greek Mythology, Prometheus, the caretaker of the human spirit defied Zeus and gave fire to humanity. He gave us light and warmth, and a piece of our essence that when harnessed, brings us closer to whole. No two fires burn alike. My fire, is unwieldy and crackles fiercely in the cold darkness of a somber forest. Others, are not so, and reside in different worlds. I choose to live the way I live and believe what I believe, and burn as I do; the combination of these things, is my meaning. What during the course of my life, I choose to use to stoke my fire also becomes my meaning. Then comes the question: what do I mean? Do I have a meaning? What does my individual existence mean? That, bares the mark of a real question; one that is new to me, that I will possibly spend the next 15 years trying to answer, if life trends similarly to how it did during the previous 15.
My beachside sunset is out there waiting for me, but as Ernie brilliantly put it “The sun also rises”. If I'm fortunate enough to maintain average health in the midst of my indulgences, I’ll see 30,000 sunrises in my life before the sunsets on me and I’m nothing but my meaning. Someday, there will be no more questions to ask and no more answers to give aloud; silence, will become me, and darkness too. In a silent jovial trepidation, this soul will go, but not today. I have more questions to discover and a meaning to create out of all of this beauty and chaos that we live in. With love and deference, I digress…
