To be or not to be?

Friday nights make me awfully philosophical. While the rest of the world is out beckoning another weekend, I am usually stuck by a window sill staring at infinity. Not that it feels as hollow as it sounds- it’s oddly comforting- but like all moral and philosophical quandaries, it begs the question ‘why’. That’s a self absorbing chain of causality and one that requires opening a lot of dark doors; so I live with it as is. In fact, it is often such a soul sucking vortex of enquiry that little remains apart from the thought itself. It’s some of these remains that I intend the reader to part with today.

What is the true way of life- one of utter involvement or that of reserved detachment, one of rising desires or that of ‘just’ needs, of attachment or resignation, is it uninhibited indulgence or stoic passivism?

Understand that I do not intend to equate indulgence with extravagance nor passivism with renunciation. As strong as the words may be coming across now, the adjectives will hopefully derive a more contextual definition in the ensuing narrative.

Coming across as absolute extremities on the spectrum of choice, it is here- I understand- that you will be tempted to opt for a more practical and reasonable albeit diplomatic and self serving middle path. It is the same with life, something that comes as a result of sentience and free will. But then we’ve all had our Friday nights- moments when we have questioned, rejected, even escaped reality. Times when we have wondered why it had to be that way. These moments often culminate in one such choice between extremes- to hold on or to let go. Live with them a little longer the next time and perhaps you will sense what I am trying to get to, in case you haven’t already. For what it’s worth, try and shed your subjective perspectives that begin with the phrase ‘it depends…’ and then for once we can look at it with the objectivity that is needed.

So we all seek happiness. All of man’s pursuits are essentially attempts to increase what moral philosophers call ‘utility’ or overall happiness of the individual and society. But then there’s grief, regret, pain, anger, lust, greed, despair and frustration.

Why?

We all make mistakes and we all pay a price. However, a whole lot of life’s problems arise out of our incessant pursuits. Everything that we attach ourselves to is either taken away or ends up hurting oneself, eventually. We are all too human to escape that eventuality. For, once we wishfully engross ourselves in such pursuits, we do not quite comprehend when to put them to rest or often worse- what to make out of them. Most of our actions are born out of instincts rather than intelligent thought and therefore, unsurprisingly, most of what we do at any moment turns out to have little or no relevance with where we were some time (a year, month, week or even a day) ago.

Think about it- how often do you give a second (read ‘deep’) thought to how you invest yourself at any given moment, even in seemingly long term endeavours like career and education? Most of our pursuits are laughably incoherent, mutually unrelated and quite embarrassingly directed to an end that bears little or no relevance to any particular intermittent state of reference. In other words, had it not been for some unquestioned custom, misplaced belief, inescapable instruction or accepted ritual, you couldn’t have cared lesser about it or at least thought differently about it. It is almost like jumping over planks floating on a river, with little or no idea as to where the river leads. Perhaps this transience infested with ignorance- not knowing what will be- is the very substance of life. But at times the stark absurdity of such unreasonable pursuits makes my mind rebel. It is such unchecked indulgence that often breeds frustration and despair and it is in this context that I intend to use the word.

The obvious opposite to such an approach to life would be one of reservation. It makes perfect sense to utilize the mental faculties that put us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom- the ability to reason and rationalize- in order to distance oneself from self deprecating endeavours. Abstaining yourself from emotional investments seems the better way of ensuring you do not allow anything or anyone the power or liberty to affect you in a way that disturbs this overall happiness- peace of mind, so to say. So, although you live in the realm of the senses in a world of distractions that is constantly trying to sway you all across between states of absolute bliss and consuming grief, you resist. It is a cold, measured, mechanical and inherently self serving way of existence but it is also pure- unadulterated by swathes of those inexplicable and apparently insurmountable momentary impulses that arise out of nowhere and strive to distance you from this individual state of neutrality. 

This course of reason will, however, often push you to make choices you do not want to make. Choices that will strive to distance you from your most intimate beliefs and confront you with the darkest of emotions. It forces you to examine the warmth of human experiences from the cold and unforgiving lens of rationality. Things like morality, spirituality, humanity and love get convoluted and tend to assume disturbing proportions if you try to unravel them in this light.

So what do we all do?

We simply choose to go by what we have been taught or told. We use the society as a metric to judge what it is that we are supposed to do, something that will be acceptable, unquestionable, comfortable, manageable. We choose to blindly conform to an abstract code which was made up by people no less clueless about things than ourselves. And reason is often looked down upon by those who found its fruits too hard to live with. It is abhorred for challenging beliefs, murdering faith and above all for infesting sacred human emotions with the ‘scourge of rationality’.

So we act, we smile, we get along and then when there’s time (read ‘Friday nights’) we go back to resenting anything that will make us feel warm inside again, make us feel good about ourselves, about those choices that we think we made. It’s a vicious cycle this, one that leaves us more broken in ways that can never be undone.

True- it is both the ability to reason and the ability to empathize that makes us human. These faculties have been defined and refined through ages and put our race at the very top of this world and from what little we know- the universe. However, the ease with which we keep switching between these behavioral extremes just to serve our own petty ends, to me seems hypocritical, even narcissistic. Why should any one of these often mutually conflicting ways of life be chosen over the other? And yet we conveniently go about doing the same, eternally torn between possibilities.

I think there’s no heaven or hell, that whatever they mean is already all around us, elegantly hidden in the enormous bounties of the world. That we are all made capable of doing great good and great bad in a universe that has a blatant disregard for both. It existed just fine long before there was any point and it will continue to do so long after all of this will cease to matter. However, this universe also has an incomprehensibly strange sense of humor- it mischievously dropped carbon based sentient life forms with a mind and a heart (who somehow developed a huge sense of self importance) somewhere in an infinitely small portion of itself just to see what could happen in between!

So- to think or to feel, THAT is the question…