What is Living?

1/25/2022 12:16 AM

    What does it mean to live? A question that so often plagues the minds of humans and I am no less the human myself. It is natural, many would say, to think such ways - at least once in a while. A professional might equate it to something more imperative such as a depression while a shaman may see it as a calling to find your spirituality. Tempting as it may be to find refuge in these safe and rather grandeur forms of solutions, to me this question feels like it is the meaning itself, that the question "what is living?" is an identity with no inverse operations.

    So that begs the questions itself. "What is living?" I ask this not to revel in dark emotions or trauma, rather to understand and identify more of who I am as a person. As of now, being just twenty-three in age, I have felt my "life" has cursed me more than blessed with its experiences and routes. The journey's halfhearted but nevertheless cherished. The reward's little to none but nevertheless sought after. In this reflection - should I add: this random blabber - I find myself developing into what my brain finds to be a nihilist of sorts. But I dislike the offer of nihilistic ideals. I like hope and I like the idea of believing something. But yet, in this life I am living, I find myself nihilisticly experiencing. It is an existence of astute nothingness but yet, quite paradoxically, an existence permeating with true human emotion.

    For the past several years, I have come to fight a new battle besides growing up a child in a troubled home - anxiety. Myself my own enemy, the battle extremely skewed toward the one with control of me: my mind. This part of me experiences a lot of what humans identify as a form of "life." Mental stipulations have plagued me with the dread of no longer living. But humorously enough, these bouts of anxiousness find me fearing for the ability to "not live." No, I do not mean to not be alive physically. Rather, I fear the ability to not live in the social aspect, to not enjoy the indulgences of this current world I was brought to by fate. This, I found, are my strongest emotions, in which I prove that I am no nihilist, but yet they are negative and cause me to subsequently reject the notion therefor. Am I emotionally mute, living as a vessel of worry simply till I pass? Does that mindset make me nihilistic? I use these thought processes as ways of explaining my rather indifferent attitude to "life's" many comings and goings.

    Now that the context is out of the way, I can trace back to wondering if I am some nihilist who does not "live." I believe the answer to be 'no.'  These last couple of years were some darker times mentally for me - a budding anxiety-ridden human. But through forced perseverance and the occasional blip of motivation, I have taken hold of some things in my "living," albeit loosely. Days come in go in episodic sets of internal suffering for me lasting several seasons, with down periods where I am not truly happy but not truly sad. I am indifferent at most times, if not at all times. Even during the worst days, I find it hard to be incredibly saddened. The brightest days I find it hard to be extremely joyous. I wondered anxiety being an issue, or the former idea of being a nihilist - but yet I feel like it goes deeper.

    I think, now, as I write this meaningless body of words to be lost to time, to cyberspace and other's brains - that emotions, health, outlook are mere variables that happen while "living." Remember when I say that the question "what is living?" is the answer itself. If emotions, health and all the other parts are that of life, they are therefor not "living" but are "alive." Like Schrodinger's Cat in a sense - to other's I am not "living" but in all means of the word I am "alive." So, if these things like emotions or being a certain somewhat something are simple products of living, simple products of the makeup to the question, then what of the answer?

    The question is the answer.

 

    I am rife with emotion. I tell myself I am mute of it simply because I never actively dedicate memories to feeling certain ways. I am a human and cannot escape that much. And I am glad, even if it seems that the majority of the time (or rather, the time I choose to be aware of the fact) I suffer, I get the privilege of being a cosmic human who can not only suffer, but suffer and share the deep, nonsensical nuance of my suffering with the other humans of this world. I am no nihilist and if I was I would still be just as human and just as living despite the lack of hope in doing such.

     In reflecting on these sorts of negatives I categorize alone, I recognize that living with these negative variables does not dictate that my life is nought or that it is not active, but rather the inverse. When I am alone in the world as I am and when I scream or cry alone in a dark room, I am no less human and no less living then the next person. I am alive and living in the universe. The sorrow, sadness, anger, pain, fear, confusion are all proof that I am living, not that I am not or do not know how to.

     With that in mind, it is, unlike the way of a nihilist, my hope that you may develop your own approach to the answer we undoubtedly share to the question "what is living?"

    The question is, after all, the answer.