We Are Alive in This Chaotic World

On resisting conclusion

I want to write something longer, but I’ve very little time this morning. I’m preparing a project about Gloria Naylor’s novel Mama Day; going through the archives and sifting through her handwritten outlines and notes. So, I will keep this brief.

This week has been filled with so much pain for the world, and I have seen a lot of despair. Despair, fear, and hopelessness.

I thought I’d share what helps me through my own despair.

Despair is integral to our human experience. There is no such thing as eternal peace unless perhaps we have died. We live in a universe whose true spiritual origins we cannot trace. Why are we here? What is our purpose?

To witness? To help? To destroy?

The answers live inside us and they are never definitive, nor can they be proven correct.

Life is an assignment for which we do not have the rubric.

When I am overcome with pain I remember that pain is inevitable. I can resist it or welcome it. When I welcome pain I am more alive, because I am not turning away from anything.

This doesn’t mean I welcome pain easily. It’s not instinctual. I must suffer first, and sometimes for a long time. Sometimes I suffer without knowing I am suffering. Sometimes I blame my suffering on others without knowing that I am causing my own suffering.

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Under the Milky Way // Seth Havercamp

Our world tells us how to be. How to create. How to live our lives.

Our world preaches: be something others want you to be. Be digestible and distilled and easily consumed.

Our world asks: yes or no?

Whose side are you on?

Our world divides us into good or bad, and our brains reform themselves into a machine separating the world into good or bad, good or bad.

Is this good or bad?

Nothing is purely good or purely bad.

When we look at something and ask if it is good or bad, we divide it and reduce it.

Every single thing in this world is made of many parts, even conceptual things. Molecules are formed from chemical bonds. For everything there is a complex structure. We can study the world and yet we always arrive to a place of not knowing.

As much as we try, we cannot understand everything. We can never apprehend something completely. Not ourselves, and not the world.

I learned this when my mother died by suicide. It was a profound and obliterating lesson. My mother, someone I adored and loved deeply, with whom my relationship was fraught and painful, lied about having stage four cancer so that she could control me and control the world. She lied, and I did what she wanted me to do, and then when I decided I must no longer do what she wanted, she killed herself.

I died, too. I was dead and walking through the world, and the world felt like it was completely separate from me; a foreign place. What had once appeared reasonable and finely constructed was now chaos. Everything I had believed, in one moment, was a transparent gauze that revealed something akin to gross musculature. I saw the way the world worked, and I saw that is made no sense.

To reform my understanding of the world I knew I had to be ruthlessly honest.

In the days after my mother’s death, while everyone was trying to understand what had happened, a sense of resolve overcame me. I would not try to solve the mystery of my mother’s suicide. It was a question without an answer. I would never know why. I would rather drown in my own sorrow and pain than falsely reconstruct the world.

To have an answer I would need to delude myself, and I was unwilling to live in delusion. That’s what had killed my mother.

We never truly know why someone kills, be it themselves or others. We never truly know why we ourselves do certain things: this is why we can look at ourselves retrospectively almost without recognition. Why did I do that? We canbe strangers to ourselves if we refuse the world’s complexity.

In times of pain and conflict I allow myself to rest in not knowing. There is peace in not knowing. In not taking sides. In witnessing.

I often picture this as someone holding duality— good in one hand and bad in the other. We hold them both equally. We hold them inside of ourselves and they merge and blend into our universe. We can separate the ideas of “good” and “bad” but we cannot separate good and bad in the world, or in humanity. To do so is delusion.

But we must remember: the two are inextricable.