I Must Go On, I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On

“The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble.” — Carl Jung

Photo by Caleb Fisher on Unsplash

Playwright and poet Samuel Beckett summed up the paradox is being alive in this powerful quote. “I must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on. The resilience we all require to move beyond the unexpected shocks that most of us will experience during our lifetimes must be learnt over time. We can, and will, overcome. Resilience is a feature of humanity, in all of us, to be tapped into,” he wrote. He speaks of our obligations to ourselves, the tiredness of life people sometimes feel. And the reluctant persistence of staying alive. Most people wake up every morning somewhere between those three. One part duty, one part despair, one part blind momentum. You are in control of almost everything.

But you are capable of figuring it out.

Of squeezing meaning out of life. “Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement,” notes philosopher and novelist Albert Camus. The will to go on means dragging yourself forward even when your brain is consistently telling you,“absolutely not.” The truth is, most people don’t build resilience through choice. They stumble into it through loss, rejection, illness, failure or whatever form their personal apocalypse takes. To…