So You Want To Be an Existentialist
I'm kidding, of course. Nobody wants to be an existentialist. Existentialism is a very depressing philosophy grounded in too much reality and not having enough ephemeral joys or sorrows to distract you from the horrifying truth. If you find that you're an existentialist, you really need to get your heart broken or have a baby or at least go out dancing, fer crissakes. Existentialism sucks and is, after all, fairly pointless: if it's true that nothing you do really matters in any larger sense, it's just stupid not to be as happy as possible.
Does that make sense?
The trigger, I think, for this particular case of angst in my pangst is that a few weeks ago a high-school classmate contacted me about our upcoming 20-year reunion and mentioned that she'd also gotten in touch with the guy I had my first really serious crush on, who moved away before our junior year, and that he might come to the reunion. He is, I'm happy to say, successful and thriving; and also since escaping mid-80's, small-town Alabama, he's come out of the closet (I shudder to think what it would be like to be gay there and then, of all places and times). I'm delighted to hear he might come to the reunion, because - even aside from the crush - he was absolutely one of my favorite people. I'm also laughing heartily at myself because, hello: smart, funny, charming, thoughtful, handsome, athletic, and flirtatious? Come on!
But I wanted so bad to tell Mom. Mom would get such a kick out of this. She knew him, she was privy to all my feelings about him, she was there, and I feel as if something is missing and incomplete until I can tell her. It's really been troubling me. Maybe writing about it will help work it out, but seriously, I feel this gaping void until I can sit down with her and tell her this particular tidbit of information. It's like a machine that's being blocked from performing some vital routine function and is overheating and breaking gears or - seriously, it's really bothering me a lot.
I do feel a bit better writing about it, even though this probably makes no sense at all. But it's at times like this I envy religious people the ability to believe that their dead loved ones still exist somewhere else than just in the memories of the people who knew them. Even more, I envy the ability to believe that death isn't the end, because it doesn't matter that it's (presumably) decades off still, the idea of ceasing to exist and not being able to do anything about it just scares the living bejeezus out of me.
Which is about as self-absorbed and whiny as you can possibly get, I know. I'm sorry.
All this would be easier to cope with if only there were someone nearby whose shoulder I could rest my head on, somebody who would put an arm around me and hold my hand and make gentle sympathetic murmurings while I spill out all my stupid fears and sorrows. I have so many good friends, but no one like that (at least, not within a thousand miles). Goddammit, I want my mommy!
Existentialism is nothing if not lonely.
posted by Beth @ 9:21 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I was raised Southern Baptist, and my mom still proudly claims that has her religion. Obviously to her it is the "truth" and the only "right" religion.
I always knew something was wrong with it. Despite being raised in church and going to Sunday school, something always gave me the creeps about the whole thing. It wasn't just all the beliefs, rules and stories that just didn't make sense or add up, it was something deep inside me that always whispered a warning.
Eventually I broke free of it and for many years considered myself an athiest. Still, something bugged me. Atheism didn't seem so much wrong as woefully incomplete. Atheism eventually gave way to agnosticism, and that eventually brought me where I am now.
Humans love to dissect, categorize and label things. It makes everything easy to understand and easy to control. Religious people are one extreme example. Athiests and agnostics are the other. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
At first glance, few things in nature are so black and white the rigid and nonsensical beliefs of the Southern Baptist or the athiest. If you look beyond the superficial aspects of nature, then absolutely NOTHING is that simple.
Nature, the world, the universe is marvelously, fantastically, and incomprehensibly complex. Most people can't even comprehend how incomprehensible it is! But there are some things we do know. We know that energy is neither created nor destroyed, but only changes form. We know that matter and energy are simply different forms of the same thing, and the net amount of "stuff" in the universe does not change. In short, nature does not waste, everything is connected, and everything has a purpose.
We can no more categorically say that there is a God who looks like an old white man with a long beard who sits in the clouds waiting for the puny humans which he created to scew up so he can cast us into a fiery pit for all eternity, than we can say there is no God of any kind and we are all nothing more than meaningless matter bumping around for a few nanoseconds in the span of existence. Both of these points of view are about as black and white as you can get.
Look at any example in nature, anything at all. Look deep enough and you'll see that the more we learn, the more we realize we don't know and the more astoundingly complex and unknowable the world really is. The truth, my friends, is not something that anyone can neatly package, tie a bow around and give as a gift. Open your mind. Open your heart, and think about this:
Everything that has ever existed or will ever exist, exists right now. Every calorie of heat, every wave of light, every atom, everything you can imagine. All living things, every plant, every person,
every pet, wild animal and bacterium that has ever lived or will ever live is made of the immortal building blocks of the universe. We ARE the universe, and no part of the universe ever dies or ceases to exist, but merely takes the form of another part of the universe.
When someone you love dies, do they cease to exist? No. That simply makes no sense. The individual, the collective form you once knew may cease to exist. We know that after the body decays the atoms of the body live on, as fresh and stong and new as they were billions of years ago and will coalesce to make other people or trees or soil in the future. So too it is with the energy, the spirit, the soul, the aura, the life force, whatever you want to call it, that differentiates a living thing from a non-living thing. Because you cannot see it, how can you say it isn't there? If it truly isn't there, then we are nothing more than robots, just bags of chemical reactions mindlessly doing our reactive things, and notions such as love and goodness and happiness are no more significant or interesting than the oxidizing of iron. But if it truly is there, how can we say it just "goes away" from existence when nothing else in nature, nothing anywhere, exhibits such a wasteful and pointless display?
Life has a point because existence has a point. Life has meaning. We have purpose. No experience is for naught. No person is wasted. But to see that, to truly see that, you must learn to see the world not in black and white, but in the infinite and inseparable spectrum of rich color that is reality.
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