The question that matters
Our conscious life starts with a question. The path we then follow depends on that initial question, on the answer we bring to it, and on the following questions and answers that might ensue.
The first question most people ask is: "What question should I ask?" Many of them are unable to resolve this first question. Throughout their lives they continue asking themselves the same question, and for those people, their journey remains forever at this stage of ignorant bliss and eventually ends where it started. I envy those people.
Those who overcome this first hurdle arrive quickly to the first meaningful question: "where are we going?" It is precisely in trying to answer this second question that lie the plight and delight of the human condition. One corollary question becomes immediately connected to the second question: "Wherever we are going, is it worth it?
In pursuit of something we cannot even imagine, let alone understand, most of us follow an unknown journey. We ignore when and why it started, when and why it will end, and where it is taking us. We continuously try to adapt and once we reach a certain level of control and peace of mind, the journey is already ending. We seem to believe that, if we keep going, we might reach a safer more beautiful place, where people are kinder, joy is bigger, and happiness is easier. As we convince ourselves to move in our path unquestioning, we start showing a higher degree of certainty about our direction. We advance firmly towards something that we might never reach in our current life, but we faithfully continue the journey, armed with hope and patience. We walk fast, we run, procreating, giving birth, multiplying, and bringing to this world, beings like us, believers… One day, forced by our lives to stop and ask ourselves the same simple question: “to where are we running so fast”, and to require an honest and convincing answer, we don’t really find one. We are simply pulled by the people running in front of us, and pushed by the ones behind us, surely, they all know where they are going. In reality, whatever direction we take, and whomever we follow or we believe to lead, we find ourselves on the conventional path, advancing, with extreme resolve, to the conventional end. After that end, we might remain a beautiful or ugly memory in the minds of few people, and a name on the tongues of a larger human herd that knew us without ever knowing us. The destination is finally reached, without us, like many people before us! Next …
We are armed with hope and patience! Hope is the knowledge of the ignorant and the ignorance of the savant, and patience is everyone’s best plan!
What if the only purpose of the journey is the journey itself? Will we finally meet death with more joy or sadness? With more happiness or suffering? With more peace of mind or anxiety? There is not a single answer to these questions, it all depends on the journey! Each human has their own journey, and moreover, their own perception of that journey. Two people living the same life, might very well at the end, assess the time spent on this earth in two completely different ways. In all that, one thing is certain and almost independent of the journey - at the end, just before we leave to the unknown, what remain are the regrets: the regret of the things we wanted to do and have not done, the regret of the ones we started and haven’t finished, the regret of the things we did without pleasure or joy, and the regret of the difficulties that we have suffered in vain. We wonder then, would it have been possible for us to do things differently, to do all the things we wanted to do and only the things that bring us joy, or to at least avoid the unnecessary difficulties? Have we created these difficulties or did they happen to be in our way? Have we complicated or simplified them?
These difficulties, were they an obstacle or an incentive to excel? Have they given us the strength to move forward or were they the chains that tie us down? If only we didn’t wait until the end to ask ourselves these questions! If only we asked them in the beginning…
What I personally believe is that in the vast majority of the situations we face in our lives, we are the primary responsible for the exaggeration of their difficulty, to the point that we become incapable of finding any solution during our time on earth. While in fact, only a minority of these situations is intrinsically difficult and a large part of this minority has no solutions anyway. So, if we used more intelligence to distinguish the problems that are genuinely difficult and have a solution, more wisdom to accept those we cannot change, and more courage and strength to channel our energy on solving those we can, then we would avoid, during this short life, many useless obstacles we create to ourselves and surely a lot of wasted time trying to overcome them. Despite the simplicity of this logic, we continue our journey, trying to find solutions to intractable problems, losing much of our life on barren and illusory trivia. But then again, for some of us, these invented difficulties might be the only way to give some meaning to our insignificant passage on this earth…
Let us be a bit less cynical about humans and ask ourselves a discharging question: What drives us to want to continually ask ourselves fruitless questions and to undertake unnecessary actions? Well, I have a clear answer to that question: there are two and only two culprits. They set us apart from our cousins, the animals. These are our “consciousness” and our “conscience”.
Regarding our consciousness, or in other words our understanding of life, Franz Kafka, a Czech philosopher, shared with us a beautiful, yet very depressing thought. He said: "The first sign of the beginning of understanding is the wish to die." How can that be? What does he mean?
We, humans, are blessed and cursed simultaneously by consciousness.
The consciousness of our vulnerability to suffering.
The consciousness of the certainty of death and the inevitable end.
The consciousness of the unknown that awaits us at every moment and every turn.
The consciousness of good and evil, and our inability to distinguish between them, even in their most primitive forms, even though we pretend that we do most of the time.
The consciousness of this ruthless luck that moves us according to his whims, from the highest peaks of hope to the deepest depths of despair.
The consciousness of our human limits that handicap us in the search for an imaginary absolute.
The consciousness of our insignificance in a universe of trillions of stars and planets.
The consciousness of our eternal naivety that makes us believe in wonders and splendors that await us somewhere out there in the future.
The consciousness of the futility of our quest for knowledge that will remain unfulfilled in spite of all our determination and will.
The consciousness of the avarice of our feelings towards those we love without being capable to give more.
The consciousness of our emotional scarcity, our intellectual poverty and our affective misery.
The consciousness of ALL what we could achieve and get, and at the same time, the consciousness of our incapacity to do it ALL.
The consciousness of our innate helplessness, our insatiable rage, our stifled rebellion and our unlived passions.
The consciousness that wakes us at night, disallows us our sleep, guides our decisions, and drives us to love and to hate.
The consciousness inherent in our human nature that exalts us few times and depresses us many other times.
The consciousness imbued with the hope of an eternal life, more beautiful than the one we are living today, where all things prohibited disappear, all chains are broken, and all our human sufferings vanish.
The consciousness bewitched by staggering ideas of an extraordinary beyond and a perfect heaven, and tamed by stories of a pleasant and promising continuation.
As our consciousness opens our eyes to our reality, our conscience creates boundaries and limitations that empty this newly discovered reality of its true meaning.
Our conscience, installed in each of us, pushes us to become better, stronger, more powerful spiritually, intellectually, physically, emotionally and materially, encourages us to continued research and ongoing efforts to please the owners of the final promise and eternal life.
Our conscience makes us men, like all men, therefore weak.
Our conscience defines God as God, therefore Almighty.
Our conscience convinces us that faith is the only plausible choice and extremism in faith is the only sure and certain path.
Our conscience is the only and ultimate responsible for our state of hopeless destitute, slaves of the strongest, followers of the bravest and soldiers of those who lack this conscience.
Our conscience presides our thoughts, words and actions, and leads us like sheep in our absurd lives, asking always ourselves three sterile questions: From where? To where? And why? Three questions which will remain unanswered, on this earth. Moreover, the useless quest for answering them is a waste of the limited and “potentially precious” time that we call life.
There is ONE AND ONLY ONE question that deserves all our energy, all our intelligence and all our efforts, to find its answers and to live them, and that question is:
HOW?
HOW can we, with the people we care about, live all the joy there is?
HOW can we, with the people we cherish, preserve our peace of mind?
HOW can we, with the people we love, overcome all the genuine adversities, armed with the ever-growing strength of the love we have for each other?
HOW can we, at every milestone in our lives, continue to search for the answers to the ONE question that matters, HOW?