I am in New York.
Walking the streets, arriving at the southern tip of Manhattan and step right off. I step of solid ground and fall straight down into the water.
The crystal clear water embrace me, I can see far off into the distance. The steep beachline next to me, going far down into the depth of the ocean and I start grasping for something to hold on to.
But the sand is not solid enough. It can’t hold my weight. When I grasp for it, it slips through my fingers. Leaving me floating in the water.
I start to panic but realize that my search for security will not work.
I let go.
Give up.
I start sinking to the bottom, moving out, away from the shoreline. I realize that this is it. Nothing within me try to resist it, nothing keep the fight for survival up.
And just when I’m starting to run out of oxygen, I wake up.
I wake up, get up from bed and start my morning routine. I make my bed, get in the shower. I get dressed and make my breakfast smoothie. I sit down for a thirty minute meditation. Drink my smoothie. Brush my teeth, pack my lunch. Put my jacket on and leave for work.
The entire morning at home, the hours at work, when I brush my teeth, meditate or write e-mails to my customers. When I talk to my co-workers or listen to my new favourite music, Mogwai, it is there.
The feeling of having died.
I can’t say what would have happened if it was real. Had my instinct to live made me struggle for survival? Had the reflex kicked in to do whatever it takes to keep on going to the extent that nothing else would have been left in my conciousness?
I can only answer that if it would happen.
But what I think about those long, long hours is the meaning of it all. What is really the point in living?
And before I go further into this, I just want to make clear that I have never had the thought of ending my life, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I can’t find any kind of meaning in life.
People always speak about the meaning of things. The cause of it. That we must find something meaningful to do, find what meaning is for ourselves. Ask what the meaning of life is. When I read the blog post on Elixir (swedish only), I get inspired to think more about this. But I can still not find a reason.
Life do not have meaning. Life is completely meaningless. All the reasons we can find is the ones we have created, made up.
Because, there is no reason or cause for the tree to grow. No reasons to get up in the morning. No reason that we have a job or that the sun is shining.
Trees grow because trees grow. That is the reason. It’s only cause. I get up in the morning because I get up in the morning. I work because I work. End of story. And as the philosopher Alan Watts once said, just like an apple tree apples, the world we live in peoples.
We can say we work to survive. But that is really the meaning of surviving? Why should that be so important? And if it isn’t important to survive, work has no meaning. At least not one we can prove. That is why we can look at animals and wonder what purpose they serve. Feel that it must be extremely boring to be a cow and stand on a meadow eating grass all day. But it is really only boring for someone who try to find purpose, looking for some fun. The cow does not have those concepts, it just do what it does until it doesn’t.
Why is it not enough to say that we work because we work. And that we will continue to do so until we no longer don’t. Then, we’ll do something else, or nothing at all.
It might sound horrible. Too much. Depressing. But when everything is meaningless, I feel a strange kind of freedom.
Meaninglessness is suddenly very meaningful.
The first thursday every month is Art Walk here in Seattle. It means that a lot of museums and galleries have free entrance. I took the oppurtuinity to visit Asian Art Museum and Henry Art Gallery.
On the way back I got off the bus and snuck into Remedy Tea, a café with 150 different types of tea.
I like tea and I like a good selection. It is one of the many advantages with living in a big city such as Stockholm or Seattle. But when I sit there and drink my Silver Needle White tea I can’t stop thinking about all these apparently endless choices we have today.
Do we really become happier by all these choices or do we only get overwhelmed by them?
Todays society give an apparent endless oppurtunity to choose who we want to be, how to live our lives and what we want, something we take for granted in todays invidualized world. At the same time, we can see how all these choices, all these oppurtunities we can experience through the internet and tv and in stores also creates stress.
When we can read about all these millions of possibilities we have to shape our lives it easy to get stuck in all the choices we didn’t make, all the oppurtunities we missed. We choose and then worry that we made the wrong choice. All these choices create an illusion of control over our lives, we can choose anything, but it also creates the feeling that it is my fault if we choose wrong, if we are unhappy. Because we had the choice.
We go around spending a lot of energy making all these choices, that when we stop and think about it seldom really make a huge difference in our lives and in the end we have less energy over to really make the decisions that are tough and important and really make a difference.
To be poor in todays modern society is not so much about finding food for the day, except for a few rare cases, it is about wether we can keep up the consumption compared to everyone else around us.
Sociologist Rollo May see this in the paradox that the more we have, the more unhappy we are. If it was truly so that we became happy by having a lot of material things and unlimited possibilities then people in poor countries be constantly unhappy, and I have seen with my own eyes that this is not so. In many cases they even seem, despite their rough situation, to be happier than us in the west. Material wealth makes life easier, more comfortable, but not necessarily better. If that was the case, life in Sweden today would be happier than in the 80’s. I would say that life is probably more fun today, but that we would actually be happier I have a hard time seeing.
Freedom is not about having infinite things to choose from but being happy with what we already got. To be rich is not about having an unlimited amount of money, it is about seeing that we already have everything we really need.
I recommend watching this inspirational TED-video about choice below. The speech is held by Barry Schwartz, the author of the book “The Paradox of Choice”. It is a well spent 19 minutes and 45 seconds of your life in my opinion.
It is strange how things that we once took for granted, held on to as if our life depended on it, suddenly is nothing more than a memory.
Just like with everything.
Our opinions, thoughts, ideas, our friends and the things we have must never become so important that we desperately hold on to them, suffocating them.
Our lives must be like writing on water, one door close, another one opens up. The world we live in, the people we meet deserve to be taken seriously, but we must never take ourselves too seriously.
What I write here is important and completely meaningless, all at the same time. We must never think that the words we use has anything to do with what they describe. To hold on to what has been is asking for trouble.
We do what we do in the moment, then we let it go.
That is to be happy to me.
Today I will board another plane. Pack my bag yet another time, go through security, arrive at a new, yet old, destination. I have been there before, but every situation is unique.
I am grateful that someone has let me stay with them during my journey, and at the same time, willing to let it go, to become a memory in my past.
Next stop is Seattle again. The first day of the rest of my life.
We are slaves in our own life for two reasons.
The first is that we believe we need external things to make us happy, the other that we think we can distract ourselves from being bored or unsatisfied with our lives.
As long as we think that material things can make us happy, we will always want more, more and more, but never really become satisfied. As long as we believe we have to live in luxury with food and wine to have a good time, we will always eat and drink too much.
As long as we can’t handle to be bored, sitting still without constantly looking for something to do, we will always be addicted to nicotine, caffeine, sugar, alcohol. When we learn what it means to be bored, we are no longer bored.
We will never give up something we think we need to make us happy. Why would we?
Break these mental ideas about how life has to be for us to be happy, and we no longer will be slaves to our surroundings.
Then, we can actually start enjoying it.