Living Mindfully Is the Answer To the Absurd

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‘If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.’
Thomas Nagel.

 

Life is absurd—and I will hear nothing to the contrary.

 

The Christian, as well as others with religious faith of one kind or another, will tell you that life, although at times seemingly unfair, is ultimately just and meaningful because there is a Supreme Being in charge who will ensure that all things are ‘squared up’ in the fullness of time. Thus, it is said that those who have suffered unfairly in this lifetime will be compensated in the life to come, and those who appear to get away with their wrongdoings in this life will be punished in the world to come.

 

Well, that is a nice myth, and I must say that I derived comfort from it for many years. I no longer do. The myth ‘died’ on me not so much when I came to the view that there were not only no good reasons for believing in the existence of an all-powerful and all-loving God but also good reasons for not believing in the existence of such a Being. No, the myth really died on me when I saw, in all its horror, the horrible presence everywhere of what is known as gratuitous evil and suffering. Evil or suffering is gratuitous if, in the view of reasonable persons, the world would be improved by its absence. It is pointless or unnecessary evil or suffering from which no greater good seems to result. Actually, it is almost impossible to provide a totally satisfactory definition of gratuitous evil and suffering. That alone highlights the absurdity and irrationality of the phenomenon.

 

Here’s just one example of the phenomenon of gratuitous evil and suffering. A cousin of mine died at the age of ten from incurable brain cancer. That is as good an example of gratuitous evil and suffering as any. What did my cousin do to ‘deserve’ that? Now, I know that question is perhaps not the ‘right’ one to ask, and maybe not even a ‘good’ question to ask, but the very fact that we ask such a question, as most if not all of us will do at some point or other in our lives, points to the very existence of ‘the absurd.’ We ask the question—but we get no satisfactory answer at all. None whatsoever. No ‘voice’ answers back. Not even the voice of reason. There is just a huge void before us.

 

The philosophy of absurdism, together with its first cousin existentialism, is closely associated with the writings of the French philosopher and novelist Albert Camus [pictured right]. His writings have played an important part in the development of my own philosophy of life. Camus wrote that, on the one hand, we have this insatiable yearning for life to make sense, that is, have purpose and meaning, yet on the other hand we find, if we are rigorously honest with ourselves, that life does not have any innate or intrinsic purpose or meaning. ‘The absurd,’ wrote Camus, ‘is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.’

We must be careful here. The human being is not absurd, nor is life itself absurd if we see it as it really is—the natural and inevitable outworking of a sometimes orderly but at other times quite disorderly and even chaotic interplay of forces and events most of which are outside our conscious or personal control. Life is what it is.

Children dying of brain or bone cancer is precisely what one would expect to find in a world that has no innate or intrinsic meaning or purpose. However, when we place our desire for meaning and purpose and all our other hopes and expectations alongside this world which is totally oblivious to all our desires and even to our very existence, well, that’s when we get the absurd. Says Camus, ‘The absurd is not in man or in the world but in their presence together … it is the bond uniting them.’

Camus’ answer to the existence of the absurd is this—rebellion … revolt. Yes, we must rebel, even revolt, against the absurd. That will not make the absurd go away but we must live as if there were meaning in our every act, thought and word. Yes, we will ultimately die and in a very real sense all that we did will come to naught, but we can invest life with a certain meaning and purpose if we live fully, are true to ourselves, and commit ourselves to some noble cause beyond ourselves. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy,’ Camus wrote in The Myth of Sisyphus. We must open ourselves to ‘the gentle indifference of the world’ and be able to say, as did Meursault in The Stranger near the very end of his life, ‘I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again.’

We do have choices in life. Perhaps they are not ‘real’ choices, for I think there is much to be said for the view that the choices that we make are necessarily determined by matters that are beyond our personal or conscious control. Be that as it may, we can still choose to be happy. We can still choose to live mindfully. We can still choose to make every moment of our finite existence here on earth count.

 

Yes, living mindfully, one moment at a time, is the answer—in the sense of being the most appropriate response in all the circumstances—to the existence of the absurd. No, mindfulness cannot make the absurd disappear. Nothing can accomplish that feat. However, living mindfully can invest every moment of our wakeful and at times fitful existence with purpose and meaning. The purpose and meaning is in the doing, that is, in the living of our days … mindfully.

 

The great Persian philosopher, astronomer and poet Omar Khayyám wrote, ‘Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.’ How true that is! This present moment, which as I write those words has become the next moment and the one after that, is all that we have. Our life here on earth is a succession of life-moments each one of which is an instant of time in which we live, move and have our being. The choice which is yours and mine is this—will we choose to live each life-moment mindfully or mindlessly?

 

Rebel against the absurd. Revolt. Choose to be happy. Act as if your every act, thought and word had meaning and purpose. Embrace the delicious irony that in the overall scheme of things nothing truly matters at all in the sense of having any eternal lasting significance. But I urge you to do more—live nobly and, above all, mindfully … in the face of an otherwise meaningless and indifferent world.

 

THE LITTLE PRINCE LIVES MINDFULLY

OMAR KHAYYAM AND LIVING MINDFULLY