Ancestry 34 - Existential Thoughts: Reasons for Justification (What is to be Done?)

And so, starting from a few primordial thoughts, often borrowed from the writings of great thinkers or gathered from common sense, even from the clichés of our everydayness, I began to retrieve, from the abysses of memory, from conversations with own people and friends, from collateral and tangential stories, the threads that brought me to the here and the now and untangle a labyrinth ultimately leads to the moment of death. The conundrum of life, of this little and insignificant life, is impossible to unravel no matter how deep in the past I venture or far from home I travel, in search for the ends of some of the threads that still weave it. The beginnings of everyone are lost in history and the expanses of the earth. And what are the expectations from the end-result of such an investigation? Absolutely none! There are no and should be no expectations, merely because one day I will perish and disappear from the face of this earth along with the few lines of recorded thoughts and the ethereal emotions I experienced whilst putting them down.

Charles Dickens reminds us that man brings nothing into this world and gets nothing when he leaves it. Most of us realise it without having read Dickens. In fact, although a universal truism, many fear this round, post-existential nothingness, and fewer refuse to accept it until the very end. Despite this tragic essence of existence, we feel all along a longing for answers, for elucidation and harmony and order, we seek an illusion of unity in a world fragmented and seemingly disorderly and chaotic, where no one seems to know where it is heading -if that matters. We are constantly striving to take a small step in understanding our existence and ourselves, to search for a flickering light in the abysses of the soul, to answer the why and we are being ourselves, while we exist and our minds are alive. Yet, such longing remains largely unquenched, despite the awareness of death and the step into the void at the end.

I feel that this longing for self-discovery becomes stronger the older I get, as my end approaches monotonously and inexorably, irresistible, unsurpassed. This is possibly due to the diversity and quantity of experiences life itself accumulates and hoarded in memory: the conversations, the readings, the travel, the incessant thinking in solitary moments. Perhaps, this longing exists latently, but just as insatiable, in most people, no matter how they express it. After all, philosophers, at least those who earn our respect by preaching by example or adapting their lifestyles to their philosophies, agree on one thing: life is presented to every mortal as a unique challenge and an opportunity to live, to think and feel to the frontiers of one’s intellectual ability, and to create – material things and ideas. He must seize and live it to the maximum possible depth and breadth offered by his time and place he achieved in the world.