Suffering

My uncle said it was after his first divorce that he turned to philosophy. After being single for a while, I can see where he’s coming from. Though it’s rather vain to say that falling out of love has kindled my interest in philosophy, it does put in perspective where its place is in our lives.

It was the great Socrates who said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Couldn’t be truer. But, there is a time when philosophy enters our lives at an opportune moment – when we are not merely interested, but compelled to examine our thinking and way of doing things. For me, as well as my uncle, it was the moment when I suffered.

I won’t be one to bemoan my station, as everyone has had his or her share of difficulty this year. But I had expectations. At 25, I was gonna be somebody. I was going to have the girlfriend, the job, the career. And it didn’t happen. I thought I was going to marry my last girlfriend and have babies and the whole nine yards. And it was a great feeling. I was comfortable, satisfied – until things started to sour. I found myself envying other relationships, and was strongly dissatisfied the one I currently had. I reexamined my life and found that I was not in the right frame of mind for my current relationship, and decided I needed change. So, knowing that I was going to be lonely for a while, I broke it off.

Now, though this isn’t the best example of applying philosophical thought to my everyday life, it was the start. The months following were difficult. I had no confidence with women, and no job. And I suffered, and suffered some more. I began to cultivate interests in things I didn’t care about when I was comfortable. I turned to music, learned to cook a great steak, and further along, gained some confidence to talk to women (still working on that one). I had to ask myself what made me happy, and why I was doing the things I did. And though there ended up being more questions than there were answers, at least I was asking the questions.

It could be argued that philosophy’s primary goal is to justify suffering. Our great staples of thought – from religion to law – have been established to give some meaning to the imperfections in our world. We don’t want to die, but we have to. The same can be said of taxes, work, disease, cruelty done to us by others and so on. And while we can say that the burdens we take up are more easily weighed when we know there’s some meaning to their existence, we can say that their understanding allows for them to be overcome.

I think of all those days when I was comfortable, and the lack of thinking I did at the time. I wasn’t writing this blog, I wasn’t playing music, and certainly wasn’t asking myself why I was doing the things I did. And it was all because I didn’t suffer. What am I doing now? The same. Constant employment is still elusive, and women are plentiful, but still a mystery. And when I ask if there is meaning to any of my pursuits, if my suffering has meaning, I can only come to one conclusion: love.

My love for music, and its ability to bring people together. My love for film, and the way it can change peoples’ way of thinking. And my love for this fucking whacky existence we call life. For what is the point of examining anything if we don’t love it? I will never learn to love suffering. But at least I can love the ways by which I may alleviate it. 

The Vanity of Time

“And you are young and life is long

And there is time to kill today.

But then one day you find,

Ten years have got behind you –

No one told you when to run,

You missed the starting gun.”

 - Pink Floyd, Time

            When I first heard Dark side of The Moon, I was a little underwhelmed. People had always said it was one of the great albums – the experience it created was life changing. At the time it sounded good, but life changing was a bit of stretch, especially at the age of seventeen when life was just beginning.

            I’ve aged some, and find myself coming back to it more and more, its wisdom a little more concrete now that I’ve had the experience to understand it. Dark Side of The Moon is about life itself, from birth to death and everything in between. But the chief aspect of life Dark Side addresses is the thing that ties all this together: time.

            Time is something we know well yet we don’t know at all. We use it to plan meetings, decide how to organize our day. Beyond this, though, what function does time really serve?

            For me, time is a reminder. It’s the only thing that you don’t want allotted in large amounts, for the more of it you’ve spent, the less of it there is to use. I mean, if I had all the time in the world, why do anything? Why try to become a writer now when I could very well do it twenty, thirty years later? If I miss an appointment, I can make another one. But where’s the fun in that?

            The biggest reminder time gives us is our closeness to death. This has given me comfort and disdain, for death reminds us that nothing lasts forever. Love, money and friends all have an expiration date. That doesn’t mean only good things aren’t born to last. Poverty doesn’t last forever, neither does an unfair mortgage, or credit card bills. Any normalcy we have in our lives might be absent at any given moment, and the same goes for any hardship. If everything lasted forever, no one would take a loan, or default on their credit. That’s a long time to go without buying a television.

            But then you may say, “if everything is born to die, why take up anything?” Look at those hair metal bands from the eighties. Two to three years is plenty of time to snort enough coke off groupies to keep you satisfied for life – but there’s always more coke and more groupies, and we can’t help but want more of that. It’s human nature to amass things, including life itself.

            Ask yourself when the last time you appreciated taking a breath of air was. It’s easy to take it for granted. It’s always there, it will always be there, and as long as we have it, we can live and flourish and snort as much coke off as many groupies as we want. What if air was finite? If you knew, how would your day be different?

There’s a reason for this: any thing that has a set amount makes it valuable. When you realize how much time you have left, you begin to realize the crime of wasting it. Unlike air, time is something that is permanently gone. You’re only young once can similarly be said about being old. In the grand scheme of things, time makes every day valuable. Lest we forget, a day only happens once, and it should be something you’ll always want to remember.