‘Your life is your life, don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. Be on the watch, there are ways out.’ — Charles Bukowski
It is easy to be a nihilist. The ever-evolving tragedies of global politics and their real human consequences can lead us to a point of apathy and surrender. Furthermore, at some point, loss and darkness will touch every one of our lives. As we navigate oceans of grief, we can be overcome; we can lose all sense of meaning and purpose. At this point, it can become hard to understand why we should carry on at all. Life is precarious; it guarantees suffering and hardship but also its opposite. To be alive is to drift between these polarities, and as many learn, in these darkest times, we are presented with a choice: a yes or no to life.
A Search for Meaning
In 1942, Viktor Frankl sat in a German concentration camp, his life’s work had been burned, his wife, brother and father killed and the child that he had fathered had been aborted by force by the Nazis. He led the kind of life you could forgive for falling into defeated nihilism.
Yet he didn’t. He found meaning in the book that he would write all over again from scratch. This provided him with the ability to go on despite the tragedy and cruelty he had endured.
We have this capacity as human beings. We have the ability to utilise moments of suffering; to realise new realms of compassion or to give us the motivation to help others enduring similar hardships; alchemising our suffering into something of beauty. A creative or compassionate act often provides the focus necessary at this point, allowing us to carry on and find purpose in the midst of sorrow.
We also have the capacity to go the other way. To become embittered, cynical and hard. This tendency is forgivable. When we witness the hardships that some have to endure in a lifetime, we can easily come to understand why love and optimism could elude some. Yet to do so is to enter into a psychological hell; a state that detaches us from humanity and from our capacity to love and be loved.
Carving Out the Beautiful
I sometimes think that the Bible story of The Book of Job has been a source of fascination over the last few thousand years because, for most of us enduring the inevitable struggles of existence, it can seem like one of the more relatable books of the Bible.
Often when grief or hardship blows into our lives it comes in multiples. It seems to me that in each decade of life, there will be a year or two that feels like a barrage of bad news and obstacles.
It is at this point that we rely on our deep-seated faith, whatever that word may mean to us, to carry on.
For me, it feels like our life’s purpose is to take the darkness we have endured and to carve out of it something beautiful, something that is both of service to ourselves and others.
We are all granted different creative gifts, whether it be the arts: music, drawing, crafting etc; or whether it be mechanics, coding, building or gardening. All of these endeavours provide us with the opportunity to create beauty.
It can be easy to underestimate the power of manifesting beauty, whether in our actions or in the things we create. We have the capacity to leave the world a little brighter than we found it and doing so is a courageous and worthwhile task.
We tend to value progressive cultural change in terms of grand movements or epoch-altering political movements, but I wonder whether history is in fact created by a culmination of smaller acts. The person who plants a beautiful garden in the middle of a concrete wasteland, the songwriter who creates a piece of music that convinces someone that life is still worth living.
We can never truly understand the ramifications of our actions, so the best we can do is act beautifully and with integrity and detach from the fruits of action as the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita teaches.
‘Perform every action with your heart fixed on the Supreme Lord. Renounce attachment to the fruits. Be even-tempered in success and failure: for it is this evenness of temper which is meant by yoga.
Work done with anxiety about results is far inferior to work done without such anxiety, in the calm of self-surrender. Seek refuge in the knowledge of Brahma. They who work selfishly for results are miserable.’ — Bhagavad Gita
The existential crisis that comes when we are faced with the harsh realities of existence, or even when faced with the existence of evil, is a necessary step in our maturation, but it is only the first step. To be stuck here is a form of infantilisation. This position has become a cultural norm; a strange nihilistic rationalism that explains everything in terms of biological drives and cold calculations.
We must move on from this point; we must, sometimes after some years of struggle, move toward a yes position. A way of embracing life not by ignoring the darkness but by choosing to live in spite of it. Colin Wilson perhaps says it best.
‘The greatest act man is capable of is to ‘praise in spite of’ to become aware of the worst forms of the Eternal No and to make the gigantic effort of digesting them and still finding life positive’ — Colin Wilson
In the end, there is no other choice. We must either decide to love and create aboard the sinking ship or build a callous around our hearts which seals us off from all existence, both beautiful and painful. Life is relentless and hard; at times, it feels almost unliveable, but live it we must, and continue to rage against the tides of hardship with enduring awe for the experience of existence itself. We are here but briefly, let us take that suffering and alchemise it into a loving art.
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