I have COVID, again. This is my second dance with the ‘Rona, and on this spin, it hasn’t hit me as hard as it did a year ago. But being home and avoiding people has given me time to think about things. I’ve been thinking a lot about thinking and what we get from thinking, life and the contemplation of life, happiness vs. fulfilment or eudaemonia, and the joy of learning new things, and so it goes on.
I’ve also been reading The Promise, by Damon Galgut, who happened to attend the same high school as I did, and who last year won the Booker Prize. And I’ve been watching TV, which lately has left me disappointed and empty.
And now it’s Sunday. The sun is showing off as it dives for cover below the horizon and I’m slightly melancholic.
The Questions
Art, in all its guises, combined with isolation, illness and introspection have delivered me to a list of questions that I’ve struggled to answer. And it’s not that I don’t have answers to these, it’s that I don’t know what the most honest and true answer is out of all the answers I have for each these. Here are a sample of some of the niggling questions demanding immediate certainty.
Who am I?
There are days when I’m sure I know who this is. This morning when I saw myself in the mirror I didn’t resemble the person I was five years ago. I’m uncertain if what I look like now reflects who I am inside. And I know that external inputs such as social media, where I work and live, my friends and the people I admire influence how I look – I seem to either conform or rebel from these expectations. In other words, many of the decisions I make, including my appearance are always done in relation to other people, not purely on who I know myself to be. For some reason I can’t find the space in which to hear my own voice and know my own preferences in the cacophony of my current situation.
And then I think to myself; if you can’t decide if you genuinely like what you see in the mirror, just based on your own preferences, how can you know anything else about yourself with any level of certainty?
Do I want to stay married?
My wife and I have this thing. We got married once, but we believe we stay married daily. We are fully aware that each day we wake up and decide all over again to stay with the person whom we woke up next to. Or, in my recent experience, the person sleeping in our bed while I self-isolate on a mattress in the living room.
When I make this decision, I want to be clear, considered and deliberate in my thinking, but the truth is that if I leave my wife, it will be shit. It’ll hurt me, it’ll hurt her and hurt our kids. And yet, if I tunnel down into the realities of the decision there comes a point where I don’t know if both she and I wouldn’t be better off leaving one another. Each time I make this decision, to stay married, I’m forced to peer into the future and ask myself if she and I would be better off going our separate ways. And it’s a scary decision to make, because we’re making it for ourselves and for one another, and we’re basing our decision on what might happen in the future and who we might end up being some day.
Perhaps this isn’t the right way to think about marriage. But the alternative is that we endure, no matter what we’ll stick together because we made a commitment to one another when we were completely different people. It’s a noble approach however, I don’t want my life with my wife to become a test of grit. I want us to have the courage to call it if being together will make us unhappier than being apart, and have the maturity to change things to allow ourselves to lead the lives we want.
So we choose one another, based on what we know now, and are confident that we’re making the right choice. Maybe confident it the wrong word. Hopeful. We choose one another hopefully.
Has my life been meaningful?
I always answered this question with another question; if I die right now, will I regret anything – done or not done? And I haven’t had a day where I haven’t been fine with dropping dead. But I’ve been thinking lately, maybe these two questions aren’t interchangeable. Not having regrets doesn’t mean that I have done anything meaningful or profound with my life. But then again, why should I? We are constantly being told that we only have one life, it’s short, so we should make the most of it.
But there are flaws with that logic. There is no evidence that we only get one life. Who is to say that this is the life we have to make count? Likewise, what if life isn’t that special? If you spend any time on this planet you will see that there is a ‘will to life’. There is this profound need for life to exist across this planet, be it a small flower growing in the cracks of a pavement or Tardigrades who appear to be able to live everywhere.
If life is so stubborn and there is so much of it about (despite human efforts to control and diminish it) who is to say that life is rare or valuable? Maybe who we are has nothing to do with life. There are days when I’m not sure that life is a prerequisite for consciousness. I’m going to stop this one here. I can spend hours considering this one.
Do I want to live?
I’m not considering ending my life, I want to be clear on this point. But I do wonder if life, in all its dimensions, is it worth living? And the funny thing is, I only consider this thought when I’ve been thinking too much about what my meaning for life is, when I’ve been considering my own mortality and my own identity.
I question my life when I feel disconnected, when I’m not in the moment, when I’m thinking about the whole of life as an abstraction, something separate to myself. I want to live the most when I’m engaged in something that holds me, that locks me into a moment and that brings the full bearing of life into an instant.
In fact, all the questions above, and many others, arise when I’ve been thinking too much, and the clarity with which I wish to rebut these whither, as does my confidence in who I am and what I cherish.
I have been mulling these questions over for the better part of a week and my confidence under their expectation for certainty is floundering.
The signs are all there.
I need to get back to living as soon as I can. As much as I like thinking, there is such a thing as thinking too much. You can’t have any real perspective on your life and who you are without actually going about living your life. Like all things, it’s about balance, and we have to balance our thinking with living.