The Grief of Living

One of the philosophies that has informed many of my recent life decisions is taoism, particularly the tao that is spoken of in the Tao Te Ching. With this, I find it to share a lot of sentiment with the "optimistic nihilist" rhetoric that I've witnessed online. Like a few of my other friends, I grew up with an inclination towards atheism, but not insomuch that it caused a despair from our souls. The words spoken by believers were true, yet they were non-sensical, the optimism was there, but the nihilism was not. And while I speak of nihilism, the particular camp I fall into is closer to the absurdist "one must imagine sisyphus happy," while that has more emphasis on the individual's good, I've recently been thinking about what an all-encompassing good looks like.

My friend made a comment after watching the musical Falsettos together, and it was: "The price of love is grief." I think their comment paints a very vivid picture of our living conditions as animals, because one can avoid the pain of living if all vulnerability is avoided, but then what life have you really lived? No one can answer this outside of the individual, and even the individual has difficulties confronting this truth, it is only left to an illusory image of a hope of a future-self. 

Something I was also thinking about was the theme and tone of Girl's Last Tour. While I was at another get-together with a different friend, I told them about how I'd arrived early before anyone else had shown up yet, and circumstances made it so that I was one of the last people to leave during the night. Something I'd been familiarized with my job was that experience of watching, as the sun comes up, more and more people are around, there's more noise, and more to be done, but also when the sun went down, less and less people come around, and the only work to be done is to be present. There was always something so beautiful about it, watching the world slowly wake up, and then return to sleep, that's what I told them.

I think Girl's Last Tour is about that, that feeling of watching everything fall back to sleep, it's an empty feeling but all-encompassing and comforting. I think that's also what my friend's comment about Falsettos highlights, is that after having lived a life full of love, all that is left is to grieve quietly. Grieve may be a word with harsh and negative connotations, but I only mean it in its somber and deathly feeling. Watching the world you once knew, die. Not in a painful and dramatic way, just as the wind blows, the stream flows into the lake, the tao precedes life, and death. 

It's a strange sensation, because for a long time I've amounted my life to "wants." I want this eventually, I want to go to this place someday, I want to meet these people, I want to have this item, and on and on. But if not want, what? There's a weird paradox, Chii and Yuuri probably exemplify it, wanting without requiring, or the inverse: requiring without wanting. 

They hold a hope in their heart that something worth their life exists on the highest layer, and when they get there, nothing is waiting for them. They lay in the snow together looking back on everything they'd done, and the sentiment I get from the writing is that what really made their lives worth it, was the hope they held throughout all of their journey that they'd reach something. It's an effortless, continuous, and sustainable concept that never falters. Not hope as something optimistic, hope as something omnipresent. They require tomorrow to live today, but they don't want tomorrow, and they aren't entirely dependent upon it either, because it doesn't currently exist. As long as they have something incomplete today, it keeps them living another day longer. I think that's what love and grief are. Having something complete you, yet temporary, and realizing being complete is really impossible, but, that doesn't make all of one's efforts completely in vain. The effort was actually the completion to begin with.

I think that's the beauty of stillness, is that incomplete projects represent someone who was there. That's probably how I feel a lot of the time. I've constantly been mourning the person I used to be, and one of the reasons why I wanted to write this for my blog was that I realized in a strangely horrific way, all anything anyone has ever done was simply to cope with living, existing. My friends think it's weird I'm not familiar with the sensation of life being insignificant, and I don't mean on a personal level, I mean on a cosmic scale. Humanity will exist and inevitably fade away as all things do, but that's so strange to me. Not the truth of it, but how I've been blind to it my entire life. If the tao is something monumental yet plain for all to see, I can't help but question (fruitlessly,) why? Lao Tzu writes: "When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn’t laugh, it wouldn’t be the Tao."

Maybe that's why people say life is tragic, and tragedy is comedy? The real secret was to know oneself, but no one ever really knows anything, we can act like we do, and sometimes we're right, but sometimes we're also wrong. We'll die before we know truth, but I guess we'll never stop trying.