Can you manage to still care, given everything we’ve seen and everything we’ve gone through? Can you manage to care about humanity when humanity doesn’t care about you? Can you manage to care about justice when justice doesn’t care about you? Can you manage to care if the caring isn’t reciprocated?
Can you manage to still care? Can you manage to care when caring is tiring? Can you manage to care when caring is a nuisance? Can you manage to care when caring provokes the wrath of your neighbors? Are you up for such heroism?
You know why to do it. You know that meaning will elude you if you don’t. You know that you’ll feel adrift if you don’t. You know that you won’t respect yourself if you don’t. You know why to do it. But can you do it? That’s a real question.
You could just exclaim, “Life is a cheat. It will rob me of loved ones. It will rob me of myself, and for all eternity. It refuses to provide me with enough meaning or even with any meaning. It just makes work for me and brings me pain. Damn it!”
Or you could paint this other picture, the kirist picture, a picture of a lone human being calmly answering the call to be good, on his or her own terms, in the face of everything, knowing that everything is a lot and maybe too much.
You acknowledge your evaluation of life, whatever that evaluation may be, and you put that evaluation off to one side, so far off that it doesn’t color your days, so far off that it hardly matters what that evaluation is. Off to the attic with it!
You treat your life as a project, as an opportunity to make yourself proud, and as an adventure foisted upon you by nature. You hold your conception of how you intend to live as more important than your evaluation of life as positive or negative.
It is such an act of self-kindness to sigh and say, “Yes, I genuinely feel this way, that life has failed me, but my head and my heart tell me that isn’t the end of the story. I can still live my many life purposes, which would make me happy and proud.”
It is an act of genuine self-kindness to air your grievances against life and then get on with the business of living. By moving on, you trade the ice-coldness of grievance for the warmth of effort and the heat of life.
Is it absurd to affirm that your efforts matter? Perhaps. But if it is absurd, you simply laugh and say, “I’m comfortable with absurdity.” You say, “I take this life as an obligation of a certain sort, no matter how ridiculous that may be.”
You say, “My life is my project and I accept that absurd, unglamorous, heroic task. I am not really up to being a hero but so be it. I accept.” You do not let your sense that life is a cheat stop you from fulfilling your obligations to yourself.
You decide to care. My response to that? Thank you.
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Eric Maisel is the author of 50+ books. You can learn more about him at www.ericmaisel.com, subscribe to all of his blog posts at https://authory.com/ericmaisel, learn more about kirism here, and write him at [email protected]
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