Learn The Only Way

Human experience is a series of punctuated equilibria. Months pass as you float aimlessly through life. You think nothing, feel nothing, you barely live, numb, vaguely contented, perhaps imprisoned, all the while aware that life exists; it does, it must.

At rare intervals the clouds open. Various manifestations yield the same end result, something I have termed ‘angst’. It is angst, or whatever you like to call it, that spurs change. Roused from a slumber, alert and aware, wholly uncomfortable, occasionally ecstatic and all together different you forge into the unknown, driven by something that makes your status quo uninhabitable.

Yes, for a variety of reasons I have had my share of angst of late. It seems like a negative word, it’s not. I take it to mean heightened consciousness, an awareness to different stimuli, a gathering of understanding about something accompanied by an associated loss of understanding about something else. Perhaps it’s like drilling for oil in ones soul, painful yes, and the geyser that results ruins the view for miles. But in the end, a new equilibrium is met, a balance perhaps is achieved. And you have thousands of gallons of unprocessed crude, black gold, just waiting to be synthesized into something useful, something necessary.

I have learned a few things from my recent eruption. I’m not sure that any of them have reached the position of core philosophies, as captured on the back half of my index card collection. Not yet, and they might even be foolish. But here’s what I learned. I haven’t figured out what it means yet, fragments, a puzzle piece, some all black and a whole bunch of them shaped like squares.

1) “Someday never comes” is a Credence Clearwater Revival song. Some Fogarty’s father left him, some day he’d understand why. When he then left his own son he told him the same thing. The catch is that this “someday” is a pie in the sky, there is no day when things will make sense, not here, someday never comes. For the last few months I’ve been telling myself that everything will make sense. Next week. 10 days from now I’ll know much better. Well guess what. It’s ten days after. I don’t know any more than before, I know less. The passage of time does not reveal answers, not in this life. Nothing makes sense, nothing is whole, nothing is untainted and nothing is guaranteed.

2) Mankind is broken. We, as a species, are sickly. Forgetting the religious undercurrent (which explains all of this neatly, and even offers a final solution), it doesn’t take much to see that most of the world has gone mad. We value horrendous things. We strive for all varieties of perversions. We manipulate, we medicate – we don’t deal with the problems that we ourselves cause because we can’t. Nothing is pure in the human experience, because humans are fallen, sullied people. Happiness breeds depression in some, mortification projects a sort of pleasure in others. Families collapse, society decays, toddlers are murdered by their parents and we wag our fingers while lapping up the stories and glorifying the video games that teach that behavior. Human society is a never ending battle against entropy, slow decay, slow destruction. We spread our brokenness to each other like a plague.

3) Nothing is guaranteed. I’ve been shaken up by the race at nationals. Stephen’s class was one of destiny. Awesome guys, guys that got along well, worked hard, had dreams, had goals, had a mission, had one last chance. And failed. I don’t understand it. Story books don’t end like this. You mean that everything I’ve ever been taught about happy endings is a load of crap? There’s always next year doesn’t work in the last year. Someday never comes. And yet we still, as a broken society, clamoring for more stuff to herald Christ’s birth, have a sense of personal entitlement. We expect that the story has a happy ending for us, and if we can’t find it naturally, we force our way to it at the expense of everyone around us. I can tell you this: in this life, nothing is guaranteed. Christian theology won’t save you here – or, it will save you…but not here. This life offers no promises. Pursuit of happiness, sure, pursue it if you want. There’s no reason why you should necessarily find it. And when you do, when that last piece of the puzzle, the one that was supposed to make you satisfied, does come around, you learn that you need more, it’s not finished. Next week you’ll have it all together. No you won’t. You might not even be alive next week.

4) So then what does one do? My refrain for the past month has been “every day, the best that you can.” Over and over again. Over and over. Every day, just do what you can, every day. No negative footprint, just do your best. Help someone, try not to hurt anyone. Just every day, every day, the best that you can do. What else can you do? In this world, you can only do the best you can. You can strive all your life for the perfection available to you, learning how to gracefully fail, learning how to pick yourself up. But the failing is an inexorable part of the human experience and you can’t make it go away. Every day, the best you can. Every day, one at a time. Just breath.

5) The uncertainty principle, as meta physics, has left many a scientist cold and confused. But life runs by the uncertainty principle as well. The more you know about one aspect of life, the less you know about another. It has been an odd dynamic, to have had an intimate, though tumultuous, relationship with God while having a tumultuous, though intimate relationship with mankind as a whole. I don’t understand it. All I know is that the more that I understand of one thing, the less that I understand of something else. This is why you’ll never be better off next week then this week. This is why you can only strive for a positive mark. Do the best you can, because God only knows how this all is supposed to fit together.

6) God doesn’t want your assent. He wants your service. He wants you to be an agent of love, orderly love, mending broken lives, slaying chaos slowly with how you live. This is true. This is biblical. We miss this too often, the intellectual religious elite. We do the best we can mentally, and we neglect everything else. The more we understand theology, the less we understand society. I don’t understand how it all fits together. And I can’t. That’s why it’s just every day, the best you can do. And for Christ’s sake, literally, that needs to be an outward process.

7) I learned that it doesn’t matter if my pens match. I have another log book. I have three pens of different colors. Two are ink-ish, and the other is a bic pen. I don’t know. I just know that I don’t have to match them. Not with the world like this. You see, the problem is that I, and you too probably, try to make up for the world’s uncertainty by making ourselves and our environs as deterministic as possible. We do what we do, regardless of if we want to, regardless of if we know why. I was in that dance class. I didn’t like it. I went anyway because I don’t stop doing things because I don’t like them. That’s wonderful for tempo runs, but why should I subject myself to dance class against my will? Because I am compulsively in control of myself, that’s why. But I don’t have to be. The pens don’t have to match each other. I can use different pens if I don’t have the ones I normally use. I can forget some things some times. How can I control the world if I can’t control myself? Why should I try? That is a pathology, control. Trying to control too much, when nothing and no one fits in a box.

It’s not the end of the world, losing control. The world is uncertain anyway. Everyone else is just as broken as I. It doesn’t matter much in the long run, so long as you do the best you can, every day. Because you might not be here next week, and if you are, there’s no reason why next week should be any better than this week, time doesn’t heal wounds, it just makes newer ones hurt worse than the older ones. Nothing is guaranteed to you, and like it or not, you’re not entitled to anything. Every day, just the best you can. That’s your lot in life. That’s my only destiny, continued existence, just continue. One day at a time.

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