Ever wondered why……

Friday night. I am in bed, I fell asleep after I got back from work. I wondered what this life is.

We are born, we breath, we think and we imagine. We are surrounded by our dreams and the dreams of others. Then we must survive and one day we die. Like all life we are flesh, and like all flesh we must perish. But unlike other flesh we also imagine a world beyond ourselves. We can think of the future and imagine the past. We can read books that transport ourselves to as many places as imaginations can wander. But for our life, contained in the soon to be corpses of our bodies we must wonder; what of our dreams?

I, like many ask these questions. I ask them because I, like many, am human. I wonder; what is the reason for my life? Sure, I can accept the fact that I am alive. And, well OK, I can also accept the fact that like every other life I have to live. Or do I? Albert Camus made the point vivid in ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. We must make the choice of life in order to live. That choice, amidst the struggle to survive for creatures with imaginations is a leap of faith. But why make the leap at all? I can only pretend that these aren’t real questions for so long. The longer I pretend the harder it becomes to live without running.

Where do I want to run? I run to Strawberry Fields and Il Postino, Stealing Beauty and The English Patient. Isn’t that the Englishman’s poetic vision, a life on the continent. The post-Byron escape (minus the scandal). It is the Romantic vision of artisan bread, cheese and terracotta, books, memories, the sea and air. Either that or death.

Is it really that black and white? Possibly not. Just like many have asked weather life is indeed for them, many too have asked a very different question; how can I live well? We are surrounded by riches all the time. There are people in my life whom I love, and I love them very deeply. My love for them,  the knowledge that they exist brings me immense satisfaction. I take please in my dreams and the possibility that one day they may be a reality. I enjoy light, seeing the sun shine through the cracks of my window in the morning brings me into a world that is a daydream.

These two strands of thought, why and how, they are both two distinct approaches in our society. Neither is more rational than the other and it is hard to know how to reconcile them. ut the why question does beg the how question. For we do have life, and with life comes the opportunity to breath if only we knew how. So much of the noise in the world around us is a sales pitch to breath. However, what we are sold are often times illusions of life. As a consequence we are forced to wonder why, because the noise often times proves an ineffective illusion. Tolstoy asked why and he looked into the world and found religious conviction. But his religious conviction was in many respects analogous to the advertising pitches we are sold today.  The answer still wasn’t how, it remained for what. Religion is an effective chimera, but still a chimera.

I can only answer for myself, I remind myself to breath. I remember dreams, and I remember to dream. Rene Dubos in his Pulitzer winning book ‘So Human an Animal‘ made a significant point; as animals we are made to work, and as conscious agents capable of imagination we don’t work for immediate gratification, we work for a future state. It is our ability to conceive a future we can live that gives us virtue. It is our disposition for an instant reward that brings us down. Bertrand Russell makes the point that it is our ability to reason that distinguishes us from animals (The History of Western Philosophy).

With reason comes choice and with choice comes the burden of the questions we are forced to answer. But as has often been discovered by thinkers in the world the subtle irony is that we have most of the answers if only we allow ourselves to think.