the realization that perpetually gouges me open

the chance encounter of their meeting as commonplace as any other,

significant in the way that nothing actually is.


they have histories of secret suffering kept from one another.

faces turned inward, away from the world.

away from each other.

childhood torment. families, slashed apart and thrown together. sacrifice. anguish. pain.

death.

a thousand untold stories swirling in every cell.


the complication of each is a mirror of the other.


they are both broken.


their jagged edges fit nearly seamlessly, save for the hairline cracks

where the light of their joining shines through.

disaster, cruelty, tragedy, and finding meaning amidst the absurdity of human existence: reflections from stoic philosophy

I can't help but feel helpless in the face of disaster, cruelty, and tragedy. 

The massacre of hundreds civilians in Kenya. The earthquake that killed thousands in Nepal. Police racism and brutality, in the States and elsewhere. Human beings are constantly faced with disaster, cruelty, and tragic circumstances that are outside of their control. I feel the pit of my stomach drop when I consider the senselessness and magnitude of the pain and violence that people have to face every day. My sheltered mind cannot begin to comprehend the hardships of others. 

I am reminded time and time again of the utter absurdity of human existence, of the fact that we are beautiful and brutal accidents. We have not been put here for any reason, let alone put here at all. We just are. We are the products of muddy circumstances and the imperfect heuristics used to navigate them.

Human life is not imbued with any higher meaning or purpose. We are all essentially fractional slivers of experience in an eternity of non-experience. The course of time, family genealogy and our own genetics have combined in such a way as to grant us the briefest glimpse of life. Thousands of us could be snuffed out at any moment, and for no good reason, other than the ideology of others or the movement of tectonic plates. Other than few influential people, most of us, when we die, affect our small circle, perhaps with a few fading ripples, but leave no other trace of having been alive at all. All lives end, and most marks fade, if marks were even left in the first place. 

We are islands of time with a void of nothingness spreading out infinitely behind us and in front of us. And we hurtle towards the void in front of us and try to do as much as we can with the circumstances we have, in order to feel that this little slice of time has meant something.

I draw on three meditations from Stoic philosophy* to keep my island from collapsing in on itself or being sucked into the void. 

Meditation One: The View from Above 
This meditation captures the reflections from the paragraphs above. It captures the absurdity of human existence, the fact that human life is not inherently imbued with meaning, that we are all drops in a vast ocean. Picture yourself from above the earth looking down, and meditate on the smallness and relative insignificance of your existence. Remember that your experiences, joys and sorrows alike, do not matter to most other people, to the planet itself, to the universe, to anything really. This keeps one from falling into the trap of egotism and narcissism but left unchecked can cause feelings of nihilism and apathy.

Meditation Two: The Inner Citadel
Just by virtue of being alive, having volition and consciousness, feelings and thoughts, we are infinitely powerful beings. Despite the fact that we are not externally imbued with meaning or significance, we have the ability to create meaning for ourselves. We can do everything we can with what we have to create lives and selves that mean something, we can do everything we can to make a difference in the world, we can experience things fully, we can learn, we can love, we can hurt and feel and experience at all. Time flows through us unrelentingly, within us and without us, but we have the power to alter the shape of our lives and this in itself is the closest thing to the divine that we can achieve. This keeps one from falling into the trap of apathy and nihilism, but left unchecked can lead to egotism and narcissism.

Meditation Three: Premeditatio
This meditation is used to practice gratitude for current circumstances. It is a common notion that we don't know what we have to be grateful for until we lose it. This meditation draws on this aspect of human psychology and instructs us to practice losing everything you love. Imagine that all that you hold dear were swept away tomorrow. It could easily happen, if the reports in the news are telling us anything. Imagine everyone you love, gone; all your possessions, destroyed; all your freedoms, revoked; all your dreams, crushed; your light and your life; snuffed out. Practice this and let it flood you with gratitude for the things that you have.

I find myself pulled between the extremes of egotism and nihilism, stretched thin between believing in my absolute worthlessness and my absolute importance. Tragedy, cruelty, and disaster are sobering reminders that we are all just blips of light in the darkness. But we are sources of light nonetheless, points of light where there could have been nothing at all.


* I draw particularly from the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius, and my understanding of it is greatly shaped by the pedagogy of Professor John Vervaeke.