I Will Not Die

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One of the things I like to write about, more than most all other things, is the state of affairs we can call, in one form another, the human condition. I like to write about the human condition. I can narrow that even more by just saying, I like to write about life. After all, the human condition is life.

The greatest pleasure I have enjoyed as a blogger has been the people I have met. While blogging, writing, I am also reading.

It’s a good thing I’m not the only one writing about life, because otherwise the world would be missing some wonderful perspectives. I’d like to share two of them with you now. They fit together so well, by being essential opposites, or even answers or rebuttals to each other, and without them necessarily even knowing it.

Before I introduce them together on the same page here, I want to express my hope that it can be understood beforehand that I’m not engaging in a kind of rhetoric here that pits one against the other. I hope this warning precludes even the possibility of any friction. Instead, I view this conversation I intend to have as an outcome from a cluster of inspired minds with great ideas who have come together at a cafe for a talk about life. It’s a conversation of utmost importance; it can define the very way we view life which in turn can define the very way we live it. This is just a really good coffee and a talk.

I hope anything I say that seems more rhetorical than mere friendly conversation is quickly understood to be not any incorrectness in these men’s words, but rather, a deficiency on this author’s part to convey his own thoughts as objectively, and as conversationally, as they have theirs…

Destination Unknown wrote “Murder and Motivation” and

Writer Dad wrote “Sink or Swim.”

Each article represents a kind of equal answer to each other. In fact, when viewed together, they represent the greatest conversation.

Destination Unknown uses the wisdom of Elizabeth George to illustrate the reality we face in a world where the vast majority of people come and go by first being born into a complex world which is, far more often than not, known only to themselves, at the end of which they disappear into the shadows of human history with not so much as even the slightest footnote in the reams of human activity on this earth. It is the anti-naive acknowledgement of the truths of this world, and it holds an answer to the question of what they can do in a world where nothingness and mediocrity is in all honesty the reality for almost every single human life, that comes, and that goes.

In a world where dream-chasing and rapid human growth are the symbols we accept and hold up as the models we aspire to have drive us on our ways, this lets us glimpse the fact that almost everyone who follows that route, will fail. Almost no one will actually live some dream life, drown in the glory of their own passions and feel a complete and total satisfaction on the doorstep that leads them out of the life they have. Billions of farm hands, simple laborers, office workers, waiters, actors, clothiers, nurses and mechanics will reach the day they die and know that even after all the wishing and trying and dreaming, they just had an ordinary life, not one that was spectacular, but not one that they despised either, but rather, just the simple life they had, where things came, and things went, and now it’s their time to go as well. When we think of this reality in advance, we are faced with the daunting sacrifice of giving in to the truth and the consequential result that the glory of most lives will peak in their simplicity and their not being known at all. In the face of that brutal truth, one could, as George says, “thrash about and hate that fact or one could cope.”

Writer Dad uses the wisdom of James Garfield to illustrate a different truth: “…nine times out of ten, the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim.” This version of reality consists of the very real image that life is a lot like what we’d expect to find if we were deported to some remote stretch of sea where we each find ourselves adrift and facing a constant gravity that threatens to pull us under the waves in which we flap about. It’s a fitting comprehension of the accidental injustice of life where we rarely find ourselves on dry land. Instead we are dressed in tide. This new wisdom prevails in showing us the dynamic struggle we are all sons and daughters of, and it reminds us through its imagery that regardless of the way we might disagree with the conditions beset upon us, we have few choices besides to sink or swim.

Ironically, it represents a very literal version of George’s sentiment that one could “thrash about and hate that fact or one could cope.” This version of life inspires us to abandon the sea and head for the rocks! In the mundane world of the unknowable sea of mediocrity and simplicity of the blue water and the same rolling waves we are forced from our bobbing habits and instructed to take up arms against the brine so that we move our arms and find an island, raft or shore. We are informed that the circumstances of the sea require us to try to stay afloat.

Both of these world views have vital truths, but both require an anticipation of knowing the unknown.

Come join me in the sea…

The first one where we come to grips with the fact that life is mundane and always will be for most assumes that to swim to shore is to exercise the possibility of drowning long before we can ever fully crawl from the sea because most attempts to seek the sunny sand will end in a drift down to the mud that beds the sea floor beneath our bobbing legs long before we ever find the shore. In the process of that exercise, we lose the chance to see the fish, feel the reef and smell the salt that keeps us company in the wide open sea in which we are born. If we strain for the route that might lead us from the sea, most of us will drown long before we dry, and when we do we can never go back to the open waves and enjoy the rolling water under the sun.

It knows that most will miss the chance to enjoy the cool, and the wet.

The second one has found the bobbing bottles whose corks keep dry the letters from the people who made it to the shore. The teasing words that tell us of a life with sand, and rocks, and trees, and grass makes us want out of these waves. They tell us about the mountains and the snow and the orchards. So we swim off and try to find the trees. We forgive the salt and seek the sand. However, the prospect of the swim is a challenge that requires the possible sacrifice of ever fully knowing the sea. We dream of the possibility of finding the dry and we suppress the secret knowledge that there is the possibility of falling under the waves long before we find the beach.

It assumes we can even reach the shore.

Ah, but this is the life we live. In our sea we try to choose what to make of the sea, but where to go? What to do? Sometimes we see a far off land and abandon the broad waves and try to swim off to that shore. Sometimes we can not even see a shore, we do not even know where to swim. We can try to swim regardless, unto a place where we might find one, but we might just swim until we die. We might miss out on what we left behind and we might still end up nowhere. We can be bold and win, or lose and die a bitter death. Or we can just learn to love the sea.

A non fantastic life is not to drown, but just to tread, until we do. Even on dry land we are guaranteed a death.

A fantastic life requires that we swim.

The only thing we can ever really know, my friends, is that we are all siblings of the sea…

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Dereck :: Aug.09.2008 :: Life, Purpose :: 2 Comments »

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