Taking it seriously
Two people cannot live together in harmony for long enough time to call it an unquestionable success. It is impossible. It is not supposed to be. We wrongly started setting these expectations on each other, and then we haven’t stopped feeling disappointed when they didn’t happen.
The eternal comedy could become more sad than funny if you take it seriously. The only way to continue to laugh through life is to avoid taking it seriously. But certain things are serious and driven by our human nature. We cannot avoid creating them and then having to deal with them. Therefore, we force ourselves to take this eternal comedy seriously and turn it into a dramatic tragedy.
What are the things that make us take our life seriously? Or said differently, what are the things that are serious in life? I asked this question to many people, and the most common themes are: love, family, freedom, justice, sickness, and someone said, well maybe we should take laughter seriously to continue in the eternal comedy!
Let’s start with love …
One day you meet a person you like, you spend a lot of fun time together, you laugh, you party and all is perfect in this world.
Then you fall in love with each other, at this point things start to become a bit more serious, and the comedy starts to have a little drama in it. The fun continues, but it is now tainted by the fear of losing the other person, had they fallen out of love with you. The laughter is frank, but not entirely free.
After falling in love, and if this lasts long enough, you then take it one notch higher in seriousness, you decide to get married. Marriage is never, no matter what the urban legends say, a step towards the fun part of the eternal comedy, it is rather the opposite. But without marriage the scenario loses a lot from its intensity.
So far, with love and marriage, nothing is irreversible. You can fall out of love before you get married, you shed few tears, then back to the comedy. You can decide to divorce from your partner, you might cry a bit more, you surely will shed few dollars on top of your tears, and then with time you rejoin the comedy. Obviously, falling in love is somewhat serious, likewise for getting married, but both these events are not serious enough to completely change the nature of the comedy.
Let’s talk about family …
Unfortunately, when you decide to create kids, you take the comedy to a whole new level of seriousness. It is not reversible anymore. If the drama catches up with you, you, the other comedian, and the kids you created together, are all stuck in an endless loop of a painful play, fraught with many unpleasant events and feelings.
Most people don’t know all this; therefore, they walk into the family path ignorant of the consequences and their ignorance is their excuse, up to a certain point. Beyond a certain point no one has any acceptable excuses for making the life of human beings they decided to bring on earth, a living hell.
But, what about the people who know? The ones who witnessed the comedy unfold on other people, or read articles about it, like this one? These people should know that once you have brought to life new human beings, then at some point or another the comedy will turn on them and become a rather painful tragedy. The pain will vary in intensity, but regardless of this, there will be nothing they can do about it. All the comedians will suffer, and the younger ones, who never chose to willingly join the comedy, will surely suffer the most. So why on earth do they do it? Why do they create the shackles to tie themselves, and the people they supposedly love the most in life, their children, to this eternal and useless comedy?
The answer to any human question is found not far from the famous and inexhaustible fountain of the EGO and the ever-giving tree of HOPE. What do I mean?
Depending on how well the couple gets along, ego can be more or less predominant in the decision to make children.When two people in love decide to create children, hope is not a determining factor. The decision is driven by the need to translate their love into something concrete they can see, touch, caress, take care of, and eventually be proud of. At any time, any couple could adopt orphans, as there are plenty of parentless kids in this world, but such thing never really happens, unless the hope of perpetuating their own ego, is lost for good. So, they create children, to eventually be proud of their own genes and their own education. If this is not an EGO-based decision, I don’t know what is!
If things are not at their peak in the relationship, hope is the main driver. The hope to bring things back to a level where their life together is a bit more than bearable. The children are the instrument of hope trying to salvage a dying relationship. When things start to take these kinds of turns, how on earth would the comedy remain one, how can we still laugh about it, when we are creating souls and burden them with the responsibility to save our incapable souls from boredom and cowardliness.
In either case things don’t always turn out the way they are supposed to become. The pride turns into contempt to each other and the hope into despair from each other. Then the two comedians understand that the comedy is turning into a real tragedy and most of them decide it is time to leave their present lives, with everything they brought in it. Before the kids realize that this thing they woke up to when they were 5 or 6 years old is a comedy, they are forced to go through the tragedy of their parents. What a cynical and unfair comedy!
I note in passing: “it is rather ironic that the same two culprits which make this life an eternal comedy, EGO and HOPE, are also responsible for making us take it seriously, and turn into a dramatic tragedy”.
The birth of a soul is a serious matter and makes life more serious. By opposition the death of a soul is equally serious, but it is merely a consequence of birth. When we choose to create a human being, we already decided on the death of that human being. The only possibility that makes this choice rational has to be our conviction that between these two moments, birth and death, the soul we create will be fulfilled and happy to be part of this adventure called life, even if the price at the end is to die and leave it forever. However, we very well know that this is not the case, at least in 99% of the cases. Therefore, the decision to create a soul is almost never rational, but rather a self-centered and narcissistic choice, fueled by another irrational feeling: hope.
Let us not forget freedom, justice, sickness, love, …
...and their opposites, and many other things and their opposites which define, shape and accompany the days between the two seminal moments, birth and death. As we stand today few thousand years after the alphabet was invented, and thousands of books were written about each of the topics above, we can simply say that the only thing that matters from of all these concepts is their outcome, what did they bring to humanity, to humans, and all living beings on this planet?
Again, to keep it accessible to every mind, two outcomes are possible: suffering and pleasure. We long for love, freedom, justice, … in the hope to procure ourselves a certain amount of pleasure, joy or at least well-being and peace of mind, and we forget or deliberately choose to forgo the undeniable fact that the unavoidable by-product of all these is suffering, sadness, anxiety, and pain. To complete this picture, it is necessary to mention that sometimes, suffering comes uncalled for, unexpected, uninvited. It comes with sickness that strikes us or the people we cherish. We endure it in our body and in our soul, and its effect multiplies when we realize that there is nothing we could do about it, not matter how badly we wanted or how hard we tried.
Pleasure and suffering, and their equivalent are things that should be taken seriously in this life. Preserving the pleasures we already have or acquiring new ones in this eternal comedy is a serious matter and we don’t spend nearly enough time in making sure it is taken care of properly. Likewise, avoiding suffering and all its sisters, or eliminating them when they befall us, is another part of our mission where no amount of time spent is ever wasted.
To come back to my original question, what are the things that make us take our life seriously? Here is my answer.
Unequivocally four things need to be taken seriously in life:
The birth of any soul,
The death of a loved one,
The pleasure and the suffering of every giant soul.
Everything else, either lead to these four serious moments of the eternal comedy and therefore are serious or they don’t and hence are the laughable part of this comedy.
So, let’s laugh when we should, meaning often, and let’s think deep and hard in the moments that matter.