Going On Living

The Choice and the Moment

Camus once famously said that suicide is the greatest of all existential questions. Why go on living?

We do. And yet. You’ve felt it, I’ve felt it. It would be easier not to. Some days, many days, especially for people like you and I who see a little way into the heart of life, there only seems to be a glittering ocean of darkness.

Not just at the worst of times. But also at the best. Life is a burden, a struggle, error, catastrophe. Every moment of joy is an unborn world of pain. Every instant of happiness contains an avalanche of hurt waiting to knock us to our knees. If we are honest, you and I, more honest than we should be, perhaps, then we will admit: happiness is a spark. Evanescent, illusory, impossible to catch. But suffering is the flame. Constant, true, causative, ever burning.

Why should we go on? Can we find a reason? We can be clever and promise ourselves new pleasures. New lovers, possessions, cruelties, delights. But those fade faster every time. We can be good and tell ourselves living is an obligation. But to whom? God laughs when you and I suffer. He doesn’t weep with us or for us. The rivers of our tears are made of his silent indifference. We can be innocent and tell ourselves there is a greater reason behind our lives that we just don’t comprehend. So what? A puppet wearing a crown is still just a toy.

We can be noble and create our reasons. We can have our children, fall in love, and so on. But that is just more suffering that we have brought into being. There’s no morality in this as a reason for living, just selfishness. It’s greed for life fighting against the fear of the abyss. Birth, novelty, attachment, distracts us from suffering, for a moment. But only at the price of more, harder, later.

So. As Camus asked. As you and I wonder every day that we suffer, that we struggle, that our hearts break, that our spirits are torn apart just by the work of living.

Why go on?

Some days, for me, as it is for you, if we are honest with one another, going on living is agony, pain, a curse. It feels as barren as a desert, bleak as a canyon, as unbearable as winter. Desperate and foolish and empty. There is nothing more tempting than ending it all. To just release this self back into darkness. What could be sweeter? Death is the truest lover. It holds no remorse, no more suffering, no more self. Nothing else can promise us that. So how sweet it seems. Just letting this existence go. Its exhaustion and its fury, its rage and its disappointment. Cutting it away at the root, like wheat that needs a harvest.

Why is the idea of dying so sweet, so tempting, so seductive? Because nothing is more sensible.

Just as nothing makes less than to go on living another day, nothing makes more sense than dying this very day. Letting this world, the insanity and foolishness and heartlessness of it, go, for the last time. And falling back into the glittering arms of darkness.

And that is the only reason that there really is for living. We must live not because it is reasonable, but precisely because it is not.

It is the unreasonableness of life that makes it worthy. Nobility, creativity, love, forgiveness, truth, beauty. Life would be none of these things if it was reasonable. And so it would be emptier than death. A lover holds your fragile bones and it means something. Because you have both chosen this reckless act of living. Every last bit of meaning, possibility, worth, in our brief shining lives comes from the senselessness of choosing to live.

Nothing is more reasonable than death. More sensible, more rational, more tempting. And that is why everything mighty and in this life begins with defiance. Every instant we are alive is a moment of defiance. Against what is reasonable, sensible, rational. Against all the little violences we visit on one another. A rebellion into grace, into truth, into meaning. That is how you and I know we are free. Only in that defiance can be born courage, strength, wisdom, grace.

These are the questions that make us human, alive, aware, awake. To pretend that we aren’t tempted by death, that we don’t struggle, each and every one of us, no matter how we happy or successful or wonderful we might pretend to be, with going on living, is to live truly inauthentically. The darkness in us is still light. It is really just there to let us know what true darkness is. The absence of love, in this great and profound way. Love, even for death, reveals that we are human, after all.

Me? I will struggle with my darkness every day. As I always have. Why go on living, when one should die? The question itself holds the answer.

Nothing makes less sense than to go living another day. Especially for those of us who feel the autumn leaves already falling in the summer. Nothing makes more sense than dying this very day, this very hour, this instant.

That is why we live.

Umair
Philadelphia
August 2016