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I have lots of little habits, as many of us do, in service to feeling good: get up at this time, eat this kind of food, exercise this many days per week.
If I’m not careful, maintaining these habits can become mental clutter. I’m going to die one day, and it doesn’t feel good to spend any of my precious and finite life-time tracking my daily water intake.
Sometimes, it seems as if these habits are being perpetuated for their own sake - just to make me feel good about my life. It becomes only scaffolding, built so high and dense that its original purpose - to support the core underneath - is obscured, and then forgotten. Anything built from ego supported by more ego is bound to collapse.
So what is the point of doing any of this? What’s the point of feeling good or for that matter, feeling anything?
This can become a very draining question but - and I don’t think I’m alone in this - it’s always in the back of my mind. It’s mostly benign, but sometimes it gets pushy, and must be addressed.
When I have had to address this inevitable thought, it’s never been done in a simple one-step question-answer format. More appropriate to the nature of the question is relentless further complication, with one common denominator: a constant reminder that I don’t exist in a void.
My context is what gives my life meaning.
It reminds me that what I see is not all there is. Input, the information of the universe, is infinite and ever-changing, and I couldn’t get to the end of it if I spent my whole life trying.
This context - my self in an infinite swirling mass of information, walking around touching and hearing and seeing - is what makes my life more than just a collection of activities to keep me busy and fed and sheltered until I die.
When my existence is put in context, I have a sense of my self as a moving part in something larger. In context, I am resilient.
When resilience is built, the down times aren’t so disastrous. It’s optimism - my future is worth living - mixed with reality - I’m not always going to feel like my future is worth living.
If you’ve ever had a downturn and needed to build yourself back up, you know that action feeds into feeling and feeling into action. When the resilience is damaged or faded, it can be bolstered by scaffolding: actions that allow it to heal. It’s knowing why I do the action in the first place that makes it valuable.
Exercise will release tension, good food will prevent distracting hunger, and all of it will make me resilient enough to consistently and gladly complicate and answer and re-answer what is the point of anything?
To keep finding a way to make this endless interview energizing, rather than draining - to not shy away from this question, but to make my conditions suitable to address it.
This interview, the necessary figuring-out of what the fuck we’re all doing here, can give way to joy. There is a whole world moving and changing around me, surrounding me like a forest I’ve yet to explore, a library of books I’ve yet to open.
In this joy, I feel the woods enveloping me, letting me know how much more I still have to uncover. And for a little while, I can see the point.
“Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep. (1)
1. Frost, Robert. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Poetry Foundation, accessed October 2, 2021.
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