Life: It’s meaning

There was this thing. I found it one day in my less than stellar wanderings attempting to spring clean. It was a metal thing painted blue, about four feet long and it had a thingamajig at the top connected to a doohickymabob and at the other end there was a crooked whatchamacallit. I had no idea what it was. But we had it. It was there. It must have been a thing worth having at some point by someone in our life. So I took this thingamajig dookhickymabob to Himself and put it on his lap and said: “What is this?” And he examined it closely, turning it about in his hands and holding it up to the light and then putting it on the floor. Finally he looked up at me and said, “I have no bloody idea.” So we both looked at this thing with great reverie. And so then I eventually said, “Should we keep this thing?” And he said, “Well, we don’t know what it is. We don’t know what it is for. We don’t know where it came from and so, Yes, we should keep this thing.” And I agreed. And this was the conclusion we came to. Because it was the obvious conclusion to us.

So I would occasionally come across this thing and I would sneak it under George’s pillow so when he went to bed he’d find it. Sometimes I put it in the shower stall at night knowing he would come across it in the morning. Once I put it on the car seat. And once I put it inside his winter coat. One day I snuck it inside my jacket into Giant Tiger and put it in the sock bin before George made his way down the aisle to the sock bin. The unexpected. I did this just because it was bloody absurd. It became a game to play all our years together. Putting this thing where it was least expected. He would hide it after my prank and it would take me a few weeks to find it again. But I always did. I would drag it out of the back of the linen closet and put it on top of the wood pile where he would be chopping kindling the next day. Once I wrapped it carefully in a big box and gave it to him as a birthday present. He would look at me with a ragged flat expression and sigh. And I would do my triumphant smirk. And then we would laugh and the game would begin again.

There are people who are reading this who are trying in their head to figure out what that thing was. I can see their brains logically reconstructing and supposing and concluding. There are others who can’t understand the whole point of this and why we didn’t throw the doohickymabob out. And then there are the other ones who realize how funny it is. But most importantly there are those who truly understand how extraordinarily funny it is. Those are my kind of people.

Life is a doohickymabob: We don’t know what it is for. We don’t know where it came from. We decide to keep it because it is there. We don’t know what to do with it. We hide it when we can. Sometimes we pull it out and play with it and laugh. It always keeps turning up somewhere when we least expect it.

There are many people who think that we are living in a hell world now. That we have culminated our entire human history into an amorphous mass of conflicting angry and righteous opinions without sense. That we have descended into a theatre of opinion and rationalizations. Some think we are in the post-Ideological age, or on the cusp of robotic dominance, or creatures now reduced to living in a meaningless universe. We are none of these things. We are simply absurd. Meaningfully absurd in a foolish kind of way. And in our deepest being we know this. That our lives are a bitter irony leading to our biggest fear, that of death.  That we are, after all is said and done, insignificant. I’m going to tell you something. We "are" insignificant. We are deeply absurdly utterly insignificant. It is this fact alone that makes life worth living. How in hell else can we not find that deeply worth living for? It’s extremely funny. And the search for our own significance is the funniest thing we ever will do. How many times do we find ourselves sitting inside the shambles of our deepest failures and darkest despondency desperately attempting to at least pretend to look like we’re not bloody idiots? How many times do we rush out to buy a book to teach us how not to look like bloody idiots? Or take up causes so we can join all the other bloody idiots trying not to look like idiots? We are all idiots. There are no exceptions.

The only difference between the bloody idiocy of our lives up until now has been the number of choices we have to mitigate our own idiocy. We have a lot more choices now. We’re standing at the Starbucks counter of life looking at the menus trying to pick the right coffee. No one ever chooses the coconut latino raspberry  latte. Because nobody in their right mind would choose the coconut latino raspberry latte. This is why you have to try the coconut latino raspberry latte. George taught me that. It’s not the fact of life we need consider. It is the fun we can make of it. And the ultimate answer to life is the love that guides us in that direction. 

 

In memory of my George. August 24, 1953 - March 21, 2016

I will always love you.