Now, I love stargazing. To sit beneath the vast expanse of the cosmos, your world wrapped in an elegant blanket of brilliant, sparkling lights so distant yet so close, perhaps beside the campfire or on the shores of some wilderness lake–it’s a remarkable sensation you can’t find anywhere else. You can lie there for hours on end, peering into infinity, glimpsing the great beyond, befriending those grandiose celestial bodies. From the ground you watch the universe swirl around you in the heavens above like a sophisticated dance choreographed especially and solely for you, lying blissfully beneath it all. After a while you find yourself separated from your body, floating amongst the endless abounds of creation, nearly touching those divine, ethereal sparks that beckon you across time and space. You are welcomed into intimate places unlike that which you have ever experienced–places of calm, of belonging, peace and joy. Here you are, entirely insignificant in the scale of being, yet all is alright. All is as it should be.

 

You long to hold on to this moment forever. At this moment, it is as if everything falls into place. You understand that you’re nothing more than a grain of sand in a boundless desert, but you feel so meaningful and connected to it all. Those distant, glistening orbs speak to you as if they were the closest of friends, and soon your conversation evolves into a song, and as this happens you began to understand: you are just as much a part of this song – this magnificent, divine chorus of life – as those trillions of notes far, far away. And in this moment, all is well. If you could just stay right here until the end of time…

 

Yet, everything ends, and these special moments would lose their significance should we be able to cling to them endlessly. Eventually reality sets in, and you find yourself back on Earth, subject to its demands and the demands of your human mind and body. And, as humans, we are frail and vulnerable. We are thrust into this absurd existence and have no choice but to make sense of it. The trouble is, there’s no sense to be made. The very structure of being is paradoxical; life is just an infinite, fluctuating chain of contradictions, our minds constantly at irresolvable odds with themselves. It seems the more critically you think about life, the more obscure and unreasonable it becomes. The solutions to our deepest desires, those longings for clarity and certainty, are simply not there. Yet we raise our towers of confidence upon them regardless, inevitably to fall.

 

It almost seems like a cruel game. We are bound to this human condition, a condition inextricable of this yearning for clarity, unity, and purpose, yet we are equally bound to the cold, indifferent, and chaotic universe we call home. Through some entirely arbitrary means, consciousness arose on this planet and a monkey called itself “I.” And now here we are, a fluke in a vast cosmic soup. We are quite literally jelly zapping itself into hallucinating reality. Our minds and everything within them are just illusions we’ve tricked ourselves into believing for biological reasons, for protection, for reproduction. Yet this has become a quite sophisticated illusion, and now we long for more than food, sex, and basic protection. We’ve evolved to the point where we are never satisfied. We’ve got a taste of what we can be, this fantastic cosmic machine we’re a part of, and now we want it all. Yet understanding this universe is a luxury we’ll never have. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know. Answers are always eluding us, the essence of existence always transcending us, so we engage in this endless game of cat and mouse, which can end with either the cat catching a decoy, because the mouse never even truly existed, or sitting alone in the dark, running its mind around in circles while it tries to grapple with the absurdity of its existence. Then it either kills itself, or continues the chase. In these moments, the stars become less of a chorus and more of a taunt, reminding you of your insignificant place in a meaningless universe; reminding you that just as suddenly as you arrived here, you’ll be dead; that eventually the earth will wither away, and the stars will stop shining, and everything you ever lived for, or hoped to live for, will vanish. And then you think, or perhaps more so you feel, “what’s the point?” 

 

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.”

• Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 

 

Perhaps it’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves at some point. Is life worth living in the face of the “unreasonable silence” of the universe, as Camus put it in his groundbreaking existential essay The Myth of Sisyphus? If our nature is intrinsically incompatible with this world, why stay? If existence is pain, as comically declared in my roommate’s painting on our fridge, why go through the trouble of pretending otherwise for some 80-odd years, only to kick over and die? Are we not just playing ourselves by raising false hopes that we cling to so desperately until the end, committing what Camus calls “philospohical suicide”? The only thing we can be certain of is uncertainty, that around every corner turned there could be some mad revelation that entirely unravels the fabrics of everything we hold to be true, that affirms how truly powerless and irrelevant we are in the dark expanse of time and space.

 

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

• H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

 

In my experience, no literature truly drives home this sensation of existential dread than the work of the renowned horror author H.P. Lovecraft, who writes not about monsters and demons, murderers and psychos, but about us and the stars. He defined an entirely new genre: cosmic horror. After setting down a story of Lovecraft’s, you’re not going to be locking the door and holding a bible close, because you can’t escape this horror. Not at all; after closing At The Mountains of Madness or The Shadow over Innsmouth, you’ll be questioning your very existence and your identity as a person on this Earth. Certainly, he employs the use of monsters, such as the dreaded, sleeping god Cthulhu, but what makes his work seriously terrifying is what they represent. Lovecraft’s horror is a slow burn. Many nights later you’ll be peering into the galaxy, gazing into that dark abyss, and that’s when it really hits you: you’re tiny. You’re pointless. You’re entirely defenseless. You’re a fragile little blob of egotistical flesh on a fragile little speck of dust soaring through emptiness. You know nothing. You are nothing. 

 

You. Are. Nothing. 

 

This is a phrase I wrestled with for a long time, and continue to wrestle with. Our whole lives we are programmed to believe that we have to mean something, that to live a happy, fulfilling life there has to be something greater behind it all that makes it worth living. But I’m inclined to believe we’re just hopeless romantics, and the deep-setting revelation that that might not be so is painful, is world-shattering, and even eventually numbing. It suspends you in a limbo between something and nothing, feeling and apathy. And, in retrospect, that is a dreadful place to be. You wish you could backtrack, bury all that you had found and resume living in the comfort of a life shielded from the ever-creeping void. But “man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them,” (Camus). Seeing the world as you once had is a luxury you’ll never have again. Swimming to the surface is now a useless endeavor. You can either drown, or learn to live in the water. 

 

But how does one muster up the will to continue living once submerged in the understanding that all you held true about life was an illusion, the arbitrary dream of a thoughtless cosmos? 

 

Embrace it. Take it for what it is. Don’t shrink from your nature, anxiously turning from it and seeking other methods of comfort. Sink into what you are. Call back on those moments beneath the stars, and remember that remarkable sensation of belonging, of harmony in the symphony of the universe. It’s all one grand process, and you’re a part of it. The idea that you’re something else is all that is hindering you from experiencing this magnificent cosmic game. So stop thinking so much, and feel. Just live, and life no longer needs meaning. Or, quite contradictorily, the meaning of life is the lack of meaning. If you’re nothing, then you can be everything.

 

“The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves.”

• Alan Watts

 

Meaning implies the future, and the promises it holds, which don’t exist. All you have is the moment before you, so live it with passion. In whatever it may be, the most authentic living is that of raw, unobscured passion; of feeling and doing. The illusion of our thoughts cloud genuine experience. When I’m playing the piano, I’m not truly enjoying the music when I’m stressing over the notes, concentrating too intensely on the sheets, and second-guessing myself every key pressed, returning once again to the sheets in a vicious cycle of awful music. But when I relax and allow myself to feel the keyboard, and receive the music rather than throw myself at it, I can get lost blissfully in wonderful dancing melodies and striking harmonies.

 

Embrace each moment for what it is, each event as another essential note in the symphony of life, without judgement and egoistic selection, and perhaps you will find a connection that transcends yourself–an understanding that you are it and it is you, and you are there and there is everywhere, always. 

 

We’re a part of this magnificent world and its infinite processes, and not by our choice. What is our choice is what to do with it. We can resist it, and our place within, renouncing nature and looking towards other means for fulfillment. We can condemn it, declaring it inherently miserable and not worth any effort to make it otherwise. We can eat it up viciously, devouring each and every pleasure coming our way, leaving us wanting more and more. But the commonality between each of those is the desire to have it for what it isn’t. The reality is that life is not ever going to be what we want. Our search for happiness and peace will never end, because we’ll never be able to hold to those. But that’s alright. Like I said earlier, everything ends. It’s the nature of reality. The coin of life will flip and just as we had happiness and peace we will have sorrow and distress. It’s ridiculous to insist otherwise. Life is a great paradox; it never resolves. It’s our human condition, and on impulse we resist it. But when you stop analyzing life with your illusioned mind, and feel it in totality, with passion, you begin to see that it’s a remarkable condition, and you can accept it in stride. Perhaps life is an absurd dream, composed of somethings out of nothings, blacks over whites, life out of death. But suddenly you realize that it’s a rather incredible, absurd dream. Sure, it’s a fluke, but you can see now that consciousness is a miraculous fluke.

 

When someone is asked what they’re ultimate goal in life is, what they’re working towards and why they’re here, the answer is often peace and happiness. Everything we do, when it comes down to it, is because we want a joyful, un-worried life. That’s probably an answer we’ve all given at some point; it sounds good, we all want that right? But I’ve decided against it. For me, I’ve resolved, it’s passion and harmony. Living each moment fully and authentically for what it is, where it is, as a perfect piece in the puzzle of life. 

 

So what else is there to do but live this fantastic, burdensome, delightful, nonsensical dream? Life can be an hysterical comedy or a captivating drama, or even a heartbreaking tragedy. Live lots and live passionately, because the more you feel, the more you are, and being is beautiful.

 

“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”

• Alan Watts