All is Love

The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.

~ Albert Camus

Life is Silly

Life is silly. It’s absurd that we’re even here, that we exist; ridiculous that we have arms; laughable that we discuss; ludicrous that we eat breakfast. Yet we do all these things, against incredible odds.

Why do some celebrate life while others endure it? Because those who cherish life understand that it is absurd.

The promotion. The breakup. The traffic. The move. This is the stuff that life is made of. From inside our bubble, these things are of monumental importance.

Set against the backdrop of the cosmos, however, these things become comically insignificant. For some, that depresses. For others, it uplifts. What is the difference? And what’s love got to do with it?

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

~ Carl Sagan

Inconsequential. Fraction of a dot. I’m reminded of an opening scene from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, in which our young protagonist is taken to see a therapist. His mother sits beside him on a couch, and implores Alvy to tell the doctor what ails him.

“The universe is expanding,” he mutters.

“What has the universe got to do with you?” his mother asks. “You live in Brooklyn!”

The universe is expanding, and Alvy is depressed by this. What does anything matter if one day it will all end?

What does it all mean?

Love. Everything we fight for, whether on the battlefield or in our hearts, is love.

But why? If everything is so insignificant, why is love the exception?

If absurdity is the First Truth, love is the second, and the last.

Imagine you’re a therapist. A troubled soul comes to your door, begging to be rid of their problems. Could you use Carl Sagan’s advice to lift her spirits?

I understand that your husband left you, that you lost your job, that your mother didn’t show you affection, but none of that matters, you see. We’re only a pale blue dot.

I somehow doubt that this would provide any comfort. Let love enter the picture, though, and all becomes clear.

Let me give an example or two. In Changeling, a distraught mother loses her child. It’s easy to understand, then, how this struggling mother would fail to attach any significance to things like promotions and long lines at the grocery store. Her child is lost, and her missing love is all that matters.

Why is Romeo & Juliet the ultimate story of love? Imagine our two tragic heroes lamenting the ‘C’ they were just given on their latest college exam. It’s an absurd notion, of course, because nothing matters but their love.

Go back to your patient. Would she feel so despondent if there existed some trace of this all-encompassing love? Probably not. Everything else pales in comparison.

But can you lead her to these conclusions through logic and reason? Can you simply explain it? No. Of course not. She has to feel it, because, supreme principle that reason is, intuition must, on occasion, make up for its shortcomings.

Imagine watching over a colony of ants. For hours, days, weeks, you watch over them. You watch them struggle, overcome, fail, succeed, live. You know, of course, that their actions mean relatively nothing, that their struggles are insignificant. Now, imagine two of your ants fall in love. Would you attach the same meaninglessness to their love? Most of us, knowing its power, would in fact feel that their love is now the only thing that matters. That is life, and life is love.

Insignificance is a depressing thought for some, only because it is viewed through a constrictive lens. Widening the lens reveals love, and only when held up to the light of love can the illusion of darkness be revealed.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.

~ Leo Tolstoy

Secrets (a Confession)

This is an attempt at The New Normal.

This is a personal post. The personal post, in fact. It almost feels as if all posts have been leading up to this, in a way, since most of my thoughts tend to circle around the premise. Warning: this may be a long one.

I didn’t go to college. There. I said it. This has long been, literally, my only regret in life. To understand why this simple fact has played such a major role in my existence for the past ten years, I have to go back a bit.

In high school, I lost my love to a car accident. Until that point, it was simply assumed that I would go to a good school after graduation. I had good grades, was very knowledge-hungry. When she died, though, I stopped trying. I barely managed to pick up a pencil for the next year. Honestly, I’m not quite sure how I graduated.

So I never applied to college- never even tried. And here’s the thing: nobody said a word about it. Not one word. Nobody ever said “What the fuck are you doing? Here’s an application. Get to it.” Everyone was afraid to speak up.

“He’s having a hard time letting go. Just leave him be.”

Before I knew it, I was nineteen, living in a shitty apartment and making seven dollars an hour moving furniture for a living. I came home from work one day, to what would become my wife, and as I sat down on the couch, exhausted, looking around the room at the cheap faux leather furniture, I realized that I hated my life.

I decided to do something about it. I joined the Navy, following in my grandfather’s footsteps, and opted for the college fund they offered in lieu of the enlistment bonus. Fifty thousand dollars (plus the GI Bill) would be plenty. I’d serve my four years, go to school, and get myself back on track.

It didn’t work out that way.

I made another mistake- one that has haunted me ever since.

I committed a crime. I engaged in a sexual act with a person who was, at the time, not old enough to consent to such an act. I was not aware of that fact until it was too late. Three months later, I was called into NCIS. who informed me that I was to be court-martialed for violation of Article 114 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

I was court-martialed, and my sentence included six months in the brig and a Bad Conduct Discharge.

I lost my college money- all $89,000 of it.

Around the same time, I found out that I was going to be a father. I couldn’t apply to college and take on the required student loan debt. I had to find a job.

A lot has gone on in the years since, but fast-forward to today, and I’m thirty-one years old, and still have no higher education.

I’ve come up with many excuses along the way as to why I haven’t taken the plunge. None are justified, or rationally sound. Most have something to do with that fatal mistake I made ten years ago: I’ve carried it around like a fifty-pound ankle bracelet, hiding my past from everyone I encounter while using it as a crutch, an excuse to fail. I hid it even from most of my family. (If you’re family, and learning of this for the first time, please accept my apologies. It’s much easier to tell these things to the blank page).

I used what I want to do as an excuse: the job that I want does not exist. I want to write, but I don’t want to be a conventional writer. I want to write novels, true, and freelance magazine pieces, but I also want to deliver stories in a way that’s never been done. After reading Craig Mod’s Hack the Cover I became fascinated with the idea of merging a book’s cover design with the text itself. I came across Days with My Father, a brilliant and immersive story told through pictures and text on a simple webpage.

I began to think of my dream job: telling stories in a completely new way, through a completely new medium. The evolution of the story began to take a firm hold on my mind.

How the hell would college help me land this job? What the hell is the job I want, anyway? It resides somewhere at the intersection of my interests- philosophy, literature, writing, design. A formal education in these disciplines would almost certainly not yield a job in any of these fields, let alone all of them, so how could I justify spending, say, 50k on an investment that was likely to produce almost no return?

I was missing the point. The point, as David Foster Wallace so brilliantly points out, is to develop the ability to think in a way that is required to move an industry, a person, forward.

My thirst for knowledge has led me to educate myself, in a way, over the years: I devour articles, books, videos- anything that furthers my grasp of the world. This is a helpful, but flawed, approach. It feels like erecting a structure on a bed of sand. My body of knowledge may contain all the pieces necessary to complete the structure, but the foundation on which it sits is porous and unsteady. I may be able to grasp a piece on Kant’s Categorical Framework, but I’ve no idea what prerequisite knowledge may be missing (Rumsfeld was onto something with his ‘unknown unknowns). I have the talent, but lack the skill.

Even my writing is haunted by these unknown unknowns. Is there a technique I'm not privy to missing from this essay, this short story? Is there a fundamental character development principle that dooms my writing to fail before it begins?

Besides, no progress will be made unless I take a step- any step.

Advance, and never halt, for advancing is perfection.

~ Khalil Gibran

I’m finished hiding from my past. I’m finished hanging my head when friends gather to share college stories, implying, by omission, that I have college stories, too (I’ve even made some up a time or two). I’m finished setting a bad example for my daughter. How could I possibly look her in the eye when the time comes for her to go to college when I haven’t done so myself?

The world owes me nothing. What I will gain, I must take from it. So, while I work on a play this winter, I will study my options. Come January, when the play is over, I will continue my education. I will take the next step, which is, in fact, the only step.

Feature Creep

Feature creep is a phrase often used in the tech world to describe a product that, as it slowly adds feature after feature, becomes a bloated and less useful version of its previous, simpler self. It’s a malady that often afflicts products in and outside of the digital world.

It can happen to people, too.

The other day, I found myself in a conversation in which I was dismissing the opposing perspective almost as soon as my brain registered it. These were valid arguments that directly conflicted with my point of view- typically, the stimulus for growth.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

~ Aristotle

This was not the sign of an educated mind.

Once I noticed my behavior, I stopped the conversation and began to investigate. When did I reach this point? How did I reach this point? I constantly praise the ability to see things from a different perspective, so why was I doing the exact opposite?

Feature creep.

Those of us who pride ourselves on personal growth- who seek out new ways of thinking, who strive to educate ourselves, monitor our habits in order to change them- run a dangerous risk of succumbing to feature creep.

My mode of thinking was, “I am the one who reads a lot, who works on bettering myself every day. I am the only one whose opinion matters, because I am the ‘enlightened one.’

I wasn’t thinking this out loud, of course, or even consciously. It only became clear when I put myself under a microscope... but I was thinking it. Every day, I add a new feature to myself: I read more articles, more classic fiction. I examine my modes of behavior, then modify them. I seek out the thoughts and opinions of those smarter than me, in order to claim their wisdom as my own. As I added feature after feature, I momentarily became the thing that I loathed.

I had become a product too complicated to remember my original purpose: to be better. I was certainly not being ‘better’ by embracing the sort of close-mindedness that I so often rail against.

---

I listened to the first episode of The Partially Examined Life the other day. In it, the trial of Socrates is being discussed, in which Socrates famously says that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” In dissecting that sentence, a thought arose among the podcasters: how many times can you revisit something? Once you’ve reflected on something to determine your stance on a subject, isn’t that it? Won’t you run out of things to ponder unless a particular situation comes up?

I thought of this after I realized what a schmuck I’d been. A supposition is never complete. You must revisit it every now and again, not only because your opinion at forty years old might differ from that of your thirty-year-old self, but because we run the risk of feature creep if our stances go unexamined for too long.

It can happen to your personal self, or even your professional self. Writers, designers, lawyers, managers: how often have you dismissed the opinions of your subordinates, simply because they’re your subordinates, or because they’re less experienced? Pay attention to your conversations. If you find yourself discarding input as soon as it comes in, you’ve come down with a serious case of feature creep.

We are imperfect beings, subject to lapses. Only when we realize that the examination must be ongoing can we personally realize the potential of the most important phrase ever to grace our ears:

The unexamined life is not worth living.

~ Socrates