Nearly a year ago I found myself peering into the metaphysical unknown and came across "the Abyss." It was something dark and terrible, an inevitability of existence which even though I had some notion of its being there, I never went looking for it, never gazed down deep into it for any length of time. To quote Nietzsche "And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." And that's what it did. I lost a lot of optimism, too much of my hope that things will turn out alright. It's probably where my bleak perspective on everything lately finds its origins. In that cavernous nothingness that all existence is doomed to, the bleak fact of our universe. Everything will eventually be nothing. It's a truth of the universe, it's slowly slipping into entropy. Eventually everything will become so distant and so cold that everything will stop, and that'll be the end and there's no way to avoid it. Camus's work, though I can't imagine it speaks specifically to the science of the universe, presents a similar conclusions. Eventually we realize that it's all meaningless, and any meaning we find in life we have put there ourselves. We can make leaps here at our cliff's edge. We can leap off, call it like it appears, and commit suicide. But those aren't the only leaps we can make. We can make leaps of science or leaps of faith, and put meaning into the hope that one of those two things will provide purpose and fulfillment in an existence which doesn't have either. I myself have always been guilty of making these leaps, more the leaps of faith than science, but admittedly I do both. These things provide hope to what would seem like an otherwise hopeless situation. But science works in the hope that man will use knowledge appropriately and justly. But if there's no universal truth or standard, who defines what that is? Put God into the mix and we have our outside perspective of morality, our universal truth, but then science becomes a bit meaningless as all falls short to the power of God and man's dominion over existence is a bit cheapened.
At this point, a fourth option is presented for how to deal with this realization. Instead of leaping off the cliff, or leaping away from it with faith in God or faith in the potential of man, a person can turn away from the nothingness and walk back to the world everyone else lives in, bringing the horror of the abyss back with him. This may be hard to comprehend, thankfully media has given a great example in the case of the Joker from The Dark Knight. The Joker was free, completely and utterly. But he was so because of his unique perspective, one which I'm not even going to try to put into words. I feel like I have the potential to become that sort of person, slowly but surely. Someone who doesn't simply have anything good to say, but someone who presents the cryptic truth in a way that it can't be avoided. I feel like my propensity for honest evaluation of what I perceive and my ability to see insightfully into people will be perverted to undo them at their very cores. Frankly the idea terrifies me as it exhilarates me.
Today was terrible not because I saw farther into the Abyss or because something otherwise awful happened. Today was terrible because I think for the first time in a long time I looked in hard enough and saw myself for what I really am; a failure. One could reason and logic that I've accomplished many things throughout my life, that I've made a difference and that I've meant many things to many people. One could say I've seen great things, thought interesting thoughts, loved, laughed, lived, etc etc ad infinitum and ad nauseam. But really, anything someone could tell me all comes down to me and how I accept or reject it. I know that here and now, my very nearly 26 years on this planet have been squandered. I've done next to nothing with my time that was worth it. For all my intelligence, wit, and charm I've produced no results that I can say are either lasting or worthwhile. I'm unhappy at the deepest level with who I am and what I haven't done, what I've never made myself do. I'm adept at putting off, at making excuses, and finding other things to distract me. I'm adept at ruining my life. I could never be fully conscious of how many ways I've endeavored to degrade my experience on this planet, how hard I've worked to sell myself short. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to unsatisfactory existence is littered with shortcuts.
I'm angry at myself for making me so miserable. I know how I've done it, my inability to decide any course of action leaves me doing nothing at all. Doing nothing has produced splendid results. So splendid that contemplating a slow fade into nothingness is now more preferable to me then spending another day languishing for a chance to ruin any opportunity that I come by.....
But, today, when I felt myself literally shaking at my frustrations, ready to scream and lash out one violent, final time to bring some sort of meaning in how I chose to end things, it all faded away, like it always has before when I've grown desperate to the point where I no longer feel human. You may not be traditionally religious or spiritual, but I can tell you at moments like this I'm aware that no force on Earth can so simply and so effortlessly erase the poisoning emotions from my being like they have been erased in times like today. When all that darkness and misery and horror fades away, I remember...
I believe in man's capacity for the infinite. I believe in man's power to choose and to create and to will into existence that which he desires to exist. I believe that who or what I am today isn't what I have to be tomorrow. I believe that we define ourselves not simply by where we finish, but how we worked to get there. I desire purpose for my life, so I'm going to go make it. I want to accomplish on a daily basis, so I will find ways to triumph on a daily basis. I want to be happy, to cherish what experience I get to have and the people with which I get to experience it. I want to never feel so desperate again and I know, for that, I will have to believe that nothing is ever so desperate. Hope remains for those willing to fight to keep it. The universe may one day slowly fade to darkness, but I intend on recapturing the light of my existence and I intend for its brilliance to be blinding.
-M
P.S. Camus presents a fifth option wherein one stays at the cliff, acknowledging the absurdity of it all and being content with it, finding happiness in its lack of meaning. That feels like giving up to me, so I chose not to present it.
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