Playing Fair and Being Kind

Sometimes I think it’s a shame
When I get feelin’ better when I’m feelin’ no pain.

Gordon Lightfoot

What a day this has been. First snow of the winter and low, low temperatures to add to the celebration of this season of little daylight and bone chilling nights. You have to love this great state of Maine. It never disappoints.

I was perusing the social networks today on the interwebs and I found a link to an article that attempted to explore the question of an emotion that we sometimes feel. Unfortunately I had no interest in reading such a long written piece. Mostly because what I experience when I see written words that claim to know what the hell this thing called living is all about. I have my own ideas and sometimes I wish I had no ideas but, too late for that. I have ideas and they involve mind numbing fears that I have spent my whole life ignoring and avoiding. The idea I speak of is my own impending death, my mortality, my fragility and vulnerability. I live in a constant dis-ease regarding my own end. Every action and thought and moment of activity revolves around the knowledge that I am going to stop existing someday and the older I get the greater is the certainty that this condition will show up sooner.

So, every day of my life since I figured out that I was going to die (probably around the age of seven or eight years old it came to me one night as I lay in bed before falling to sleep) I have carried with me this little tag of an idea that I was existing only to not exist some day. In the meantime I was marooned on this planet careening through space with others just like me, people waiting for their moment of non-existence. A crowd of scared humans engaging in avoidance behavior or mindfully engaged in sharing some personal truths with like minded companions. Regardless, the whole of our placement in bodies with minds on finite paths to hardly nowhere seems terribly cruel. What we have left to us is to choose how to spend the days we have. What do we do? Why do we do what we do? The questions are too difficult for me to answer.

I don’t believe there is any such thing as happiness. Happiness is non-existent and what we think is happiness is simply less angst and emotional pain. A relief of sorts that gives us a false “upper”. The fear of death gets introduced to us early on and after many hours of processing and rearranging our thinking many of us come to terms with the inevitability of our end. Think of it as an uneasy truce with the end. There are some strategies for forgetting our mortality and you can see this happening daily. Behaviors of all sorts and degrees are exhibited and for the most part all of them are actions to avoid thinking about the end. Death. That is why I quoted Gordon Lightfoot in the beginning. Whenever I hear that line I am reminded that it’s a shame that we only feel ‘good’ when we feel less pain. We don’t really feel good. We feel less pain. The pain of living knowing there is an end coming certainly.

My favorite avoidance behavior is to be kind to others and to avoid as much as possible the types of activities that seem most designed to help the really fearful forget. Those things are too shrill and mindless for me. I seek out quiet spaces and I think of ways to engage people to help them along. So far so good. As I advertise this space: Play fair and be kind. Also, stay involved.