[Kirism is the contemporary philosophy of life that I’ve been developing over the last several decades. It is psychological, philosophical, and existential and takes into account human nature, the human predicament, our contemporary understanding of the world, and our pressing individual and species-wide challenges. I hope that you’re enjoying learning more about it in this series of posts. To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced. To be in touch with me about Kirism, please drop me an email to [email protected].]
A philosophy of life must also be a philosophy about the world. It must demand of itself that it address how society and culture operate, what forces align against the individual, and how each individual might want to relate to that messy, pressing reality.
It must likewise be real and true-to-life about circumstances. Human beings are not free to ignore quarantines, market crashes, cruel parents, persecutions, earthquakes, industry closures, or eight-month winters. Our circumstances matter.
As Kirists try to make sense of their relationship to the world, they are confronted by the sobering reality that the world is not a pleasant daydream. They can’t spin it out for their own amusement. Yes, it can be as beautiful as a garden filled with flowers; but it can also be as hard as nails.
That hardness leaves Kirists shaking their heads. What is a Kirist supposed to do about climate catastrophes, the reappearance of plagues, shameless greed, religious warfare, the return of fascism, and even small events like fender benders and pimples appearing?
What is a human being supposed to do? Well, Kirism returns us to a rock-solid first principle: that we demand of ourselves that we make life purpose choices and that we strive to live our life purposes, even as we are forced to take the world and all of its arrows into account.
That is, we try. We make an effort. We understand that the world is hard. We understand that the world is not concerned about fairness. We understand that tornadoes don’t target us but tyrants may. For tornadoes, we build storm cellars. For tyrants, we resist. We make an effort.
And we know with great clarity that we can’t determine beforehand if our efforts will actually work. Will our storm cellar protect us? Will our resistance to tyranny do us more harm than good? Will any of our efforts produce the experience of meaning that we crave? We make our choices—and then the world tests them.
We make decisions based on our understanding of the world, and, often enough, the world informs us that we’ve gotten the picture wrong. Maybe we thought that this or that plausible pursuit would prove a golden meaning opportunity. It didn’t. Yes, that amounts to a crisis—but we stand ready to make a next effort. We do not say, “I am defeated.”
Maybe you decide on a life in the world of non-profits. Don’t non-profits support excellent causes? You start out enthusiastic and find yourself quickly resigned to the fact that your non-profit is authoritarian, sanctimonious, ineffective, and dull as dishwater. Yes, crisis. But defeat? No.
Maybe you become a public defender so as to help the defenseless and the innocent. You burn out in two years because of your large caseload and the unjustness of the system, having, in the process, put on forty pounds from mindless over-eating. Crisis? Yes. And so you must organize a new life—that is your mandate.
Maybe you’re an actor. You get a huge break and get to star in a silly movie that supports fairy tale thinking and costs $500,000,000 to make. To assuage your guilt, you donate your salary to charity. And here comes your next equally silly opportunity. What a predicament! But you face it.
Maybe you are born into a time, a town, and a family that hates who you are. They hate the look of you, your very nature, your very existence. You do not know this at first—for the first year or two of your life, you’re still able to laugh and smile. Then you aren’t. The world has not done you a favor! But you can leave your town and make a life.
The world is much more our albatross than our oyster. As a child, you’re fed homilies and ordered to put a good face on life. At the same time, you look out at the world and can’t help but wonder if you aren’t being sold a bill of goods. Didn’t all those genocides really happen? Are you supposed not to notice?
Picture a clear-eyed seven-year-old. She has questions that she maybe doesn’t dare ask. How can it be that millions of children are starving? Why are people homeless? Why do her parents tell her that an imaginary man who couldn’t possibly fly around the world in one night is bringing her presents at Christmas?
If she does dare ask, what humbug will she be told? She sees the world with her own two eyes and she also receives the world via a million messages with which she is bombarded. This makes her deeply cross-eyed. Her sorrow commences.
Because the world can be hard as nails, because our efforts to live our life purposes regularly fail, because we quickly learn about loss, injustice, humbug, impermanence, and death, there is no help for us: sorrow will live between the lines of life.
You will experience sorrow. You are a human being and all human beings experience sorrow. And, being human, you’ll experience sorrow at the very oddest moments, say when life is quite good or when something unusually excellent happens.
Life can be good. Life can even exceed our expectations. But even at such moments, and often especially at such moments, feelings of sorrow, melancholy and regret invade us. We wish that the moment would never end—but we know that it will.
That a given moment can be at once wonderful and full of sorrow speaks to the layered nature of now. Now is no simple thing. Kirists know this. Nature did not build us to just peel a potato. It built us to sometimes think about death even as we peel that potato. How hard!
You hold your child’s hand and experience a truly wonderful moment. Suddenly you grow sorrowful. You’re confronted by the inevitable passage of time and by the knowledge of all that your child will be obliged to experience, the bad with the good.
You are invaded by the knowledge of the impermanence of life. That touch of flesh provokes that knowledge and tears start flowing. They aren’t happy tears. They are the tears of sorrow that want to well up when we are reminded of what life brings.
That is how “now” works. Kirists know this. They know that painful thoughts and feelings are always hovering nearby, ready to drop into the moment. Sorrows don’t live far across town. They live off to the side of every moment, waiting. And since we know this, we prepare ourselves—we are ready to meet sorrow with our Kirist practices.
To learn more about Kirism, please take a look at Lighting the Way, in which Kirism is introduced.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
