Brevity is Beauty

Usually at a semester's end, I feel nostalgic or at least a little sad that a certain set of experiences, faces, and the overall feeling that things will never be just as they are again. All my life, I've been a self-professed hater of change.

But as the countdown on my dorm room door ticks down to zero and I get closer and closer to home, I don't really feel that ache for each "last" like before. It was very anti-climatic as my professor in my last lecture clicked off his microphone for the very last time. His preceding lecture was oh so relevant to the thoughts already drifting around in my head.

Maybe it's the completely different environment I'm in, or the difficulty of becoming attached to a two hundred person lecture, or a sign of growing into adulthood.

Or maybe it's what my professor was talking about today before he sent us off into the world, having departed a semester's worth of wisdom onto half-comprehending vessels with notebooks and Macbooks. The lecture was about human values--it is natural to think we value what is permanent. Immortality is appealing and death is terrifying. We want to choose the longer lasting everything. Antiques are more valuable than new furniture; older friends are better friends.

My professor challenged this assertion. We also value what is rare, scarce, and unique. What is more scarce than time? It is the ultimate example of something important in limited numbers. And things that are abundant are just not as valuable. We often the cite the shortest, smallest, more unique moments as the best ones: sunsets and rainbows and snow falls, or those moments of uncontrollable laughter, or the agonizingly joyful moments at the top of a rollercoaster. These things are valuable because we cannot experience them whenever we want for however long we want. Their value is derived from their rarity and brevity.

By that logic, I shouldn't grieve for the loss of this snapshot in my life, my first semester in college. I should be glad that it feels so short because if it were eternal, it would also be mundane as breathing and commercials and whatever else is ubiquitous and inconsequential.

I can feel myself shifting from my old point of view, hanging onto to everything and mourning for every small loss, to something new and better. I am grateful for change, for the temporary nature of my existence. Without it, nothing would seem quite so good.

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."