You believe there is something? she asks. I try to, yeah, Ivan answers. Some kind of order in the universe, at least. I do feel that sometimes. Listening to certain music, or looking at art. Even playing chess, although that might sound weird. It’s like the order is so deep, and it’s so beautiful, I feel there must be something underneath it all. And at other times, I think it’s just chaos, and there’s nothing. Maybe the whole idea of order just comes from some evolutionary advantage, whatever it is. We recognise patterns when there are no patterns. I don’t know. I’m not explaining myself very well. But when I experience that sense of beauty, it does make me believe in God. Like there’s a meaning behind everything.
— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September 24, 2024)
Sometime in 1993, as I walked along a street in my hometown, Carndonagh, County Donegal, Ireland, a car pulled up alongside me, triggering sudden dread. The window came down, and I was met by the dark, inquisitory eyes of my father.
“Why aren’t you at Mass?” he asked.
I see myself, fierce and lean in a Slayer T-shirt, bristling with the rage of the nihilist. I longed to escape the claustrophobic small town and the towering shadow of the Catholic Church. For once I was impelled to tell the truth. “Look,” I said, “I have no faith. I don’t believe in God anymore and can’t go on with the pretense.”
I was met with an imprisoning silence. But what my father said next astonished me. “OK,” he replied. “Just don’t tell your mother.”
But that young atheist soon recognized his error. Where there is human being, there is human spirit. The feeling of aliveness. The staggering complexity of personhood. The fundamental dignity that each person seeks in a cosmos that cannot know them. And where there is human spirit, there is the pursuit of meaning. If you live in a post-faith world, as many of us do, the question of our intrinsic meaning must be confronted. How are we to define our suffering? What might give our lives significance within an unresponsive universe? To begin this conversation, one must truly encounter the self. […]
The essential self is calling always for our attention, but its voice is stifled by the slam and tumult of modern life. Its voice cannot be heard amid the babel, and it is silenced entirely before the infinite scroll of the smartphone. I have been meditating for one-third of my life, and this essential self seems to me an aspect of mind that is somehow higher, wheeling soundlessly in a private sky. You must stop and look up in order to find it, although in times of crisis it has been known to swoop down and hoist you off your feet with its talons. […]
Today, life lived on the hamster wheel of distraction has created an absurdity within the grand absurdity of existence. Many people live with partial minds not even conscious of the problem of meaning. We are no longer alienated from the world, but alienated from ourselves. We should beware a culture that has exchanged meaning for information. When conversation with the essential self grows silent, pathology is invited in. We slouch about at a loss for something we cannot quite explain. A malaise sets in that is despair without the knowledge of despair. Some unseen, unaccountable pain must be assuaged and we grow consumed by anger and cast about for blame. The irrational erupts from within and seeks a target in society. The shadow of the irrational is now everywhere about us. […]
That which takes wing inside us must come to perch, but that which takes flight in fog and storm grows lost. Deep beneath the vast economic and political failings of our age there lies a spiritual crisis, a tectonic shift beginning to quake and tear at the bedrock of our ethical societies in the West. The modern age has created a religious problem that can no longer be answered by religion, nor can it be addressed by the current faith in techno-science. We live in an age that fears silence and does not contemplate the true cost of this fear.
Almost nothing is worse, then, than realizing that your life itself has become boring. Perhaps you have at one time or another concluded that your work is drudgery, your hobbies humdrum; that even your relationships are superficial and unsatisfying. Each day reminds you of the one before. What is there to do?
One obvious answer is to run away, to throw out the old routines and connections, and find new ones instead. But maybe the solution to boredom is the exact opposite: not to seek a new life, but to go deeper into the one you have. This is exactly what the Danish existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard advocated. When life becomes tedious to you, he argued, you don’t need to look outside for something to shake up your malaise. You need instead to look inward and find what’s missing within your own heart and soul…
According to Kierkegaard, when we first find life boring, we seek new delights…This is the time, usually in early adulthood, when people are most open to new experiences and opportunities. For some…“the aesthetic” might encompass a more innocent sort of experience—a hobby such as travel, say.
This is fine for a while. For many, though, this consumerist approach to living eventually comes to seem trivial—and, ultimately, boring. “Is this all there is?” you ask yourself. At this transition to the next stage, you need to shift from treating life as an act of consumption to becoming part of a process that creates deeper experiences. You need to “get inside the machine.” …
I like to follow the path that nature gives me. Much of what happens in life is not in my power; most events are the outcome of stuff that happened thousands of years ago and will have outcomes of their own in years to come. I adapt and enjoy and refuse to fight the things that can’t be fought, I let go of the questions that cannot be answered and instead I push at doors that fall open to my touch and ignore the ones that resist too much. I have worked hard, tried hard, learned that life has flow and that resisting it brings problems. I’ve known people who fight too hard for what they want—fighting and wanting become a way of life and they never stop and never get happy. I ride streams that are going my way, share moments with people who are friendly, stroke relaxed dogs and approachable cats, cut the grass when the sun shines, shelter when it rains, and so on. Instead of standing in the ocean and feeling its swell pushing at me, trying to resist its push and then staggering and falling, I like to lift my feet just a little and be lifted. Bobbing effortlessly along like a leaf in a rill, turning this way and that to look at the world as it passes—enjoying the ride. That doesn’t mean simply accepting the ways of people. Injustice, cruelty and greed must be addressed, but I try to do it with love, with understanding and compassion. Not to confront, but to gently open a better, kinder desire-path for the stream to flow into because it’s easier. Some people, of course, are beyond the ability to change and so must be resisted. It’s not all plain sailing.
I wasn’t always a follower of the path. I wanted to be a writer and I tried so hard, entering, applying, but the doors remained so tightly closed that my knuckles bled from knocking. Then I gave up fighting and fell in love again with life, wrote the poetry of my days and the things that woke me in the early hours, demanding to be held in the mind for a moment and be seen. Now I don’t care about ‘being’ anything, I like writing for fun. Desire got in the way and slowed me down. I do what the moment tells me to do, instinctively. Of course I make plans of a vague, uncertain kind but I’m not overly attached to them.
Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
Well, I tell you, one thing I would say about your film is that, what would be really interesting for people to see, is how beautiful things grow out of shit. Because nobody ever believes that. You know, everybody thinks that Beethoven had his string quartets completely in his head. They’d somehow appeared there and formed in his head. Before he, and all he had to do was write them down and they would kind of be manifest to the world. But I think what’s, what’s so interesting and what would really be a lesson that everybody should learn is that things come out of nothing. Things evolve out of nothing. You know, the, the tiniest seed in the right situation turns into the most beautiful forest. And then the most promising seed in the wrong situation turns into nothing. And I think this would be important for people to understand, because it gives people confidence in their own lives to know that that’s how things work. If you walk around with the idea that there are some people who are so gifted, they have these wonderful things in their head, but you’re not one of them, you’re just sort of a normal person, you could never do anything like that, then you live a different kind of life, you know. You, you could have another kind of life where you can say, where you say, well, I know that things come from nothing very much and start from unpromising beginnings, and I’m an unpromising beginning, and I could start something.
