The voice was buried beneath the layers of resignation and apathy. The state of being settled in constant worries about my place in the world and so much without lifting a finger to act on it tormented me for last several years. I moved cities and countries to contend with an inescapable truth – the answer was always within myself. It is as though I was thrust into a realm of abstract consciousness these past few weeks absent from my life for a good part of the last decade. Waking up from a slumber so deep my body forced to nap furthermore from the tiredness of being still.
In hindsight I can now dissect my life into a before and the after. Everything leading to beginning of my career with a job in London is the left-hand side of my life’s equation I find myself balancing with what has since unfolded.
I do not pretend to radically propose that every choice needs to be met with a lens of scrutiny of any degree. But a varying degree, nonetheless. We tend to live a life in moments that make up our days hardly stirred by reasoning and suddenly 15 years have gone by without anything to show for. We are conditioned to follow intuitive axioms in daily settings - stopping to scrutinise every micro decision holds us back from living in the present. This statement may sound counter intuitive to the leading argument here, but the context is entirely different. We are concerned with micro decisions, whereas the life decisions that often require deeper thinking are not to be left unexamined.
The point is to live fully. In present.
I would like to declare my outright rejection of the podcasting pseudo self-help gurus selling cure to vanity and disillusionment often created by the crushing capitalistic machinery they are themselves a part of furthering the cycle of misery. This is not a prescription to start practising to live in the moment.
There is a fine line around which our intellect is walking a tightrope. Between the hedonistic pursuits and unflinching rigor commanded of an ethical life. At some point, if left unchecked - the intellect delivers us to the gates of moral blackhole sucking the darkness into our souls which can’t be tamed. And nothing vanquishes the light like an unchecked rootless existence. It is a savoir-faire.
Apathy is the sum of an unexamined life. Far more grave is its subversion of choices - it is the surrender of free will that defeats the vigour on which we must live our life. The ability to choose makes us human and failure to actively choose to live our life brings us close to living death.
It has caught up with me in the after part.
The before consisted of intentional living, an exercise in thought experiment loaded on free will and an undeterred spirit of imagination of what could be?
Faith and reason
Kierkegaard characterised faith as something that exist beyond the realm of reason essentially saying faith is paradoxical and using logic to explain it defeats the very nature of its passionate and personal commitment. In the before phase religion was peripheral in my life to an extent I called myself someone who is not religious but spiritual without ever knowing what that meant. It brings me no shame in admitting my moral compass was broken for most part. I was fortunate enough not to be confronted with temptations that erodes our core slowly. However, I am now not certain had I been presented those opportunities or actively sought them would I have ever prevailed over them?
In hindsight, I agree with Kantian premise of our moral sense as being innate and not derived from mere experience. Though the strength of character is built on denying one’s base to take us along its induced decent into pleasure seeking on its own rather than experiencing it naturally as a product of an ethical (not necessarily moral life) life. The absence of opportunity for moral corruption from my field of vision played a central part in keeping my sanity in balance and embracing hard work to further remove desire.
The recent past and present served notice to my conscience of an inevitable battle between my being and that inescapable feeling in the face of temptations. The moral sense that guides us without fail, that voice that is always there that this or that is wrong. It was always there but it began to grow louder in the face of my colossal personal and professional failures.
I have found myself on autopilot racing from one pole to the next while thinking about what comes next. The reasoning behind my actions may be missing but that overriding vivid feelings commanding me to act as per the moral law dictated never escapes me. I believe the missing part of the equation there was the non-obedience to my inner sense of duty – the moral law that legislates over us all. That was the missing commitment to the ethical life.
Intellect and will
Humans are designed to have default consciousness – a vitality that brings us to reckon with our destiny through sheer will. The mighty force. The well-reasoned glossy and packaged arguments are not meant to brush aside my self-criticisms of failure to follow through my will and instead using that will to lead my intellect down a dark alleyway of some god forsaken town on a hot summer night. I failed to convince myself to back myself up with the path i set up for myself. It had to do with how much I was invested in the path I thought I wanted to take instead of what was destined for me or what was coming to me. Seeing the distinction in those two sets outcomes now, yet again with the benefit of the hindsight, could be the missing factor I alluded to earlier – the non-obedience to my inner duty.
This theme creeps up yet again even with a will that could be bent for alternate or counter-productive outcomes directly as a result of surrender to base desires. That’s why will need to lead the intellect, and this is where I converge with Schopenhauer.
I rest my thesis in desires untamed leads the will and intellect to a dizzying spiral of evanescence.
Waking from slumber
Without subscribing to Jung’s ethos, I echo his thought on duality of our nature that the mere purpose, as far as we can discern, of existence is to awaken a light in darker corners of our own being.
Embrace our darkness because that’s ours and needs us more than we can understand. There is no light without darkness. We need meaning and purpose in life to have certainty of what is to come is rather better than we had it in the past. Past is immaterial, we are what we choose to become in the future.
We are how we perceive ourselves in the mirror in this moment not some remanent of the past finding its way into the present.
There is a brighter future to look forward to, to believe in and wake up to. Our circumstances don’t dictate who we are rather the lens of our reality determines what we become.
We are forever becoming something, knowing ourselves why we do what we do is the single greatest thing we can do for us and everyone around us. Else, life is just a meaningless existential dread.