Tuesday, July 22, 2014

The Existential

Existentialism is something I've dealt with for most of my life.

I don't know why, but it's something that I seem to have an unusual tendency toward, often falling into the pits of existential dread at the tip of a hat.

It's a word that most people probably recognize, but it's an odd concept that more describes a feeling than a concrete idea. A quick look at wikipedia defines it as "a term applied to the work of certain late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual." It goes on to explain the key trait of the philosophy, called "the existential attitude," as follows:"a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world."

I've heard this called angst and existential dread. For me, it's the feeling I get when I stop and think about life, when I start looking at the big picture. Everything small starts losing focus for me as I look at the progressively larger system; you stop seeing the trees and you start seeing the forest. But then you stop seeing a forest, you see a territory, a greenish blob on a map edged by dotted lines, and there are many more, just like it. Before long, it isn't even a map, you're looking at a green pixel on a satellite image. To make room for the big picture, you lose sight of the details. You realize that your whole life has been spent on a chunk of rock, drifting through space, big empty space. And it's so small. What does that make you? Just another gear is a giant cosmic mechanism, ticking away towards... towards what?

Nothing.

The universe began.

The universe will end.

Nothing will be left of you, and nothing you did will have made any difference as the entirety of everything returns into the black seas of oblivion. You were just another mechanism to march the universe towards its inevitable heat death, the tiniest moment of time in a dream and it will all be forgotten once the dream is over.

What now?

Now I'm sitting on my couch, and I can't even get up. I'm paralyzed by the thought of my own futility. Once you hit that point, it can be hard to pull yourself out again. You need something to latch onto. Maybe wikipedia has the answer."He (Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, generally considered the first existential philosopher) proposed that each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely ("authentically")."

Life is a very personal thing. We all need to figure it out ourselves. We all need to find that something that makes life meaningful, and no one can tell us what that is. For me, it's beauty.

As a 23 year old guy, I get some odd looks whenever I start talking about beauty (or maybe that's just my own self-conciousness kicking in, making me think I get weird looks), but I really think it's why I'm hear. Sometimes, I'll come across something beautiful, whether it's a passage in a book, a walk in a Washington forest right after the rain, the beach on a stormy day, or a the lyrics in a song. It fills me up inside and everything becomes meaningful.

It's something new to me, it's only been this last year that I've been focusing on the details around me and trying to find beauty wherever I can. Yet I feel that even before I realized that I was doing it, whenever I found a beautiful moment by accident, that all my life I horde those little moments. I swallow them down like little fireflies, and whenever I start to feel that hopelessness start to inch back in, I take a step back from the big picture. I remind myself of all the beauty in the little things. I count my fireflies. I think about how little of the world I've seen, how few people I've met, how much is still undone, I think about how many more fireflies are out there for me still to find. Suddenly, I'm not just a gear in some soulless mechanism marching towards oblivion, I am a fortunate observer and participant of a huge dance of light.

Maybe that's odd. Maybe I'm overly romantic and sentimental, but I want to share that light with other people, so that it can touch something deep and human inside of them, make them wake up from the world around them.

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