Runester

Monday itself was a pretty great day. I got into work a little late, but I was able to get a lot done (mostly trouble tickets) and then get home to an excellent meal of smothered beef over noodles.

Lisa couldn’t wait any longer, and finally told me that she had ordered a Keurig Machine, and it had arrived that afternoon. So, after dinner, I set it up and had my first cup of coffee! It’s pretty cool, and will really help on the weekend where I don’t have access to the coffee maker at work. It only came with a small sample of coffee’s and teas. We need to order a lot more, they come in custom “K-Cups” and they cost around 50¢ each.

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On the Kicked in the Dice Bags forum, Chris (one of the two hosts) posted a brief PSA about suicide. One of his associates and past GM committed suicide at the age of 39; the same age as me. After the initial comments, he added more details. It sounds like the man had years of disappointments, a serious weight problem, and had alienated many of the people in his life. The story is sad because of the potential that was lost; the experiences he’s cheated himself out of experiencing.

As someone who is 39 and overweight and who has many disappointments – I can’t say I’ve never thought about throwing in the towel. When I was young and would write what my life would be life at 40 – this is not it. I saw myself as married with children, the owner of a successful technology company, living in a large house with lots of land, etc. etc. etc. And it’s not just the disappointment that I haven’t achieved everything I wanted – or that some things are forever out of my gasp, like having children of my own. It’s also that aging and dying is gradual and unkind. Sometimes it feels like we’re dying in pieces. As much potential for great experiences and future achievement, I’m also fast running out of time. My mortality is forever before me. It’s in the grey in my beard, the wrinkles on the backs of my hands, and the pain in my knees. There can be no doubt, this body is in decline. Even if I were to go on a rigorous regime of diet and exorcise and add a great deal of health back … the timer doesn’t get reset. Another decade or two, tops, and I’m done for.

But, the irony is that as I contemplate my own demise, the time I have becomes even more precious. Each day, a gift. No matter how depressed I get, the idea of squandering what little time I have left is repugnant. I can’t wrap my mind around both positions at once: my days are running out, and each one grows more valuable for being made scarce & life is bitter and pointless and full of decay and disappointment and should be exited on one’s own terms. How strange, to feel yourself slipping into that eternal night, and then to hurry the fall!

But I’m not going to pretend like everything is peaches-and-cream and the other position doesn’t exist … or that it doesn’t have a valid basis in experience. I’ve recently read a good essay from the book The Myth of Sisyphus where the very issue of how does one go on and live, or should one even continue to live, in a universe that does not make sense and will not comply to be folded into an order comprehensible to us. The author refers to this dichotomy as ‘absurd’. The universe that is silent and uncaring and complex and completely alien to the order or morals of the human mind, and the mind that attempts to understand, interpret, and order the universe. Is there justice? Why are we here? Is there a greater purpose? Nearly all of religion is an attempt to answer these questions and the proposed answers are unsatisfying to the extreme. Instead, the author posits, the real courage is to go on living and not understanding. Accept that one is finite, and will not understand, and will not see the ‘plot’ of the story – and that there is no such plot (or that the plot is unknowable, in any case). “Standing on the edge of the abyss, and not to retreat nor to cast oneself in; but to live on the edge.”

All people of deep thought and feeling much struggle with this basic existential dilemma. All people though all of time and history and space. If there is a thread that connects us all, it’s this personal, private struggle. Some of us take comfort in the loved ones around us, in the pleasures of our lives and the potential of a future eternally unfolding.

And some of us take that final leap into the unknowable.