I am. I am. I am.

My friend was wondering why people continue to exist, and so I started thinking about why I bother to continue existing.

It's a question some people ask me when they find out I'm an atheist. Why would you keep living without the promise of heaven at the end? Or without a distinct system of reward and punishment? The guarantee of a soul or of seeing your dead loved ones again?

Well, it's a pretty easy answer, considering I'm still very much alive. At least, it seems that way. But when you really get down to it, I only keep living because I don't know what else to do. I'm just supposed to keep living; my body is designed to avoid death at all costs. It's second nature to try to survive.

But if you don't considering surviving the same as living, really living, then what makes me keep living? Am I even really living?

There's a Ropes song that goes "My life doesn't mean a thing to me/the only reason I haven't put myself in the ground already/is I don't like to get dirty." Maybe it's sometimes it's the smallest things, if not necessarily as cynical as the song describes, that keeps us adhered to our mortal coils. You don't have to have some grand reason to wake up each morning.

My philosophy dictates that people ascribe their own meaning to life and spend their time trying to do the best they can to adhere to the lifestyle they think is most appropriate. All this cliche, semi-hedonistic stuff is what I think makes life worth living. It's different for every person, and that's what is beautiful about it.

It's a whole list of cliche things that keeps me wanting to breathe every morning. I think I've written before about how I use to think of one thing to look forward to that day before I got out of bed every morning, just to make the walk to the shower a little better. I've gotten bad about not doing that anymore lately; it's a testament to a good life that on any given day, I could think of something positive that would probably happen. They are almost always really small things: an especially appetizing lunch item, getting a paper back I worked really hard on, a meeting of a club I enjoy, getting to see a friend.

Even though each of those things doesn't really add up to much, together they create a life that is positive more often than negative. I couldn't possibly quit living if there was one little thing I had to look forward to. "Oh, I will just go and die after this... oh but then I would miss this!" The sheer fact that I would be missing things is something I can't stand.

My somewhat ironic but reoccurring dream is that I've slept through important things: when I was younger, it was trick-or-treating. Now, it's exams and interviews. But the theme of sleeping through important events remains my biggest subconscious fear. Being dead for all of them would kind of suck, too.

When Christians ask me why I bother to keep living, I usually respond something to the effect of "there are amazing books I haven't read yet, interesting people I haven't met, beautiful sights I haven't seen, funny jokes I haven't laughed at. There are classes I haven't gotten to take yet, words I haven't written yet, and smiles I haven't smiled yet." Missing any of that would be too sad to bear. That's why I bother to wake up each morning. It might be cliche, but each life affirming breath reinforces and justifies my roaming around the earth.

As my darling Sylvia Plath wrote, "I took a breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am."

Sylvia Says

As usual, John Green got me thinking about something.

Quotes. I love quotes. But it's kind of a weird thing if you think about it. Why do we love quotes so much? We're just stealing other people's thoughts and ideas and putting them on tshirts, car bumpers, motivational posters, our master's thesis. It's like an acceptable form of plagiarism. We can say exactly what we want to say, but we don't have to own up to it completely because Ghandi said it first. But I love quotes nonetheless, giving me the opportunity to steal from the smart ones and use their brilliance for my own personal gain.

Anyway, John was talking about how the quotes we love, when quoted, lose their original context and enter a whole new one- the context of our lives.

I keep a real, paper journal and in it I often copy down quotes from things I read that I like. Sometimes I go back and read them later and whatnot. But I've never really looked at them as a whole, and wondered why I liked them. So here I go.

From The Bell Jar:

I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I should anymore. This made me sad and tired. Then I wondered why I couldn't go the whole way doing what I shouldn't, and this made even sadder and more tired.

Well, my first instinct is to simply say, "that's true." It seems like, most of the time, I simply do what I have to, not what I should or even shouldn't. Some people live their lives in defiance, doing whatever it is they think somebody doesn't want them to do. I think that's silly. Some people do absolutely whatever it takes, whatever the rules dictate, to put themselves in good standing. I don't really do that either. That sort of begs the question, what am I doing then? I live somewhere in the middle, doing what I need to do to get by, with no extremes and no excitement. Usually, I'm the highest advocate of moderation, but in this case, it only makes me "sadder and more tired."

There is nothing like puking with somebody to make you into old friends.

I just thought this was funny, and probably true. I don't have the experience to back that up, but I do believe there are just some experiences that two people cannot go through without growing closer. This quote always reminds me of a line in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, something about how fighting the troll in the bathroom cemented Harry, Hermione, and Ron's friendship. While that sounds horribly childish and all, there's definitely some truth to the concept and it's something I rather like the idea of.

It mightn't make make me any happier, but it would be one more little pebble of efficiency among all the other pebbles.

I really liked this originally because it hit upon a concept that I'd always been subconsciously aware of but hadn't articulated. There's a certain feeling of accomplishment, maybe superficial or maybe not, of completing some sort of task that was assigned to you. Busywork, if the term must be used. Perhaps it's just knowing you've done something that somebody else wanted you to; you're that pebble of efficiency, flowing with the current instead of against it.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell.

If Sylvia had any wits about her and this statement has any truth to it, then I should be locked up in the funny farm immediately. My life is but a series of wanting mutually exclusive things at once. I'm horrible at making decisions- perhaps I'm just neurotic. Please, give me an excuse. I'd love to know why I agonize over things, sometimes wanting two completely opposite things all at once. I think this might be a universal experience, human nature to want it all, but when you're standing there weighing the options, however big or small, you feel horribly alone. Like a neurotic person in a padded cell.

Well, I could go through the oh so many other quotes I've pilfered, but it would be so long and even more boring than this already is. So I'll leave it at quotes pulled from this one, beloved work, and maybe analyze myself further at a later date.