Where’s the Awe

I wake up intermittently through the night because every turn of the body ignites pain in my collarbone. At least by waking I’m able to prevent further damage to myself. Still, sleep is a chore.

I’m at least finding some mobility returning. I’m putting on button-up shirts more easily, flossing, and nearly tying shoelaces. They are all things that I couldn’t do last week.

I’m finishing a book that I decided to revisit: The Damnation Game by Clive Barker. It’s a favorite from college. I was curious whether the book would enrapture me like it did years ago.

Parts of the book were equally as page-turning, such as the wild and macabre introduction. However, I also struggled to find an off-switch for my inner critic.

This section has too much dialogue, and all of the dialogue is exposition, I’d think.

This section’s character motivation is questionable.

Needless to say, some of the magic was lost. Often in place of story immersion was skepticism. A mind searching for flaws replaced a mind that dared to wonder.

I recognized this inner critic and managed to barricade it for the book’s final section. For a few hours, I was again attuned to my inner dreamer.

What is it about age that causes us to increasingly kill the magic around us?

At times, the industrialization of the mind seems as inevitable as the industrialization of the environment.

It’s as though the process of adulting wrought enough grim realities to shock the inner dreamer into submission. Survival and magic are mutually exclusive. Life is work, politics, and a steady and horrifying debilitation of one’s own body. Where is there time for awe?

Sometimes finding that sense of awe can feel like finding a needle in a haystack. It’s there though, if you allow it to be. Just open a book from your youth and make the choice to see it.

Battling the Dragon

One of the more intellectual arguments against the existence of what many imagine to be heaven, or eternal salvation when described as infinite pleasure, is simple:

A constant state of euphoria cannot elicit pleasure unless there is a counterbalance to compare it with. A high cannot be understood or appreciated unless it is attained by surmounting a low. One would become numb by constant goodness, and it would quickly cease to have significance.

In other words, we need a dragon to battle, a threat, and the possibility of losing the battle.

• A fall helps us understand the significance of standing back up again.

• A scrape teaches us that flesh can heal.

• A loss reveals there’s something to win.

• A failure reveals there’s something to improve.

• An oppression reveals there’s something to liberate.

• A rejection teaches that acceptance is significant.

• A sickness reminds one that health should never be taken for granted.

Why are we (okay, why am I) obsessed with dragons? How did we conjure up this fictitious creature, and why are they always a threat to the kingdom?

I heard one intellectual argument that makes sense. Evolutionarily speaking, our ancestors likely faced two threats: venomous snakes from below (and hidden within the trees, competing with us for food), and birds of prey from above. The dragon, then, is a combination of these two magnificent predators. It is the creature that can destroy us from any vantage point. It impales us with its talons, it swallows us whole, it crushes our rib cage with its tail, and it incinerates us with its fire.

Good can only be defined if bad exists. Even a kingdom loses worth without a threat to protect it from.

It brings to mind a silly example. I have an Internet friend who has long been in search of “the perfect pair of pants.”

”What will you do when you find the perfect pants?” I asked him once.

“I know full well there’s no such thing,” he said. “But I’m invested in the quest. It’s the chase that we need to have. Let it go on forever. Take part in the chase!”

To that I say, battle the dragon. Whether it’s beaten or not is insignificant.

The Nothing

“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” - Socrates

I had a fun conversation this week with a colleague about the 80’s film The Neverending Story. In the days that followed I found myself thinking about the evil that threatened to destroy the magical world of Fantasia, “The Nothing.”

The Nothing was tied to the human world. In the film it resembled a black hole that swallowed and essentially deleted from existence all of the mystical lands and creatures of Fantasia. It was directly correlated with the adult lack of imagination and failure to dream or read books.

With the film having been released decades ago and the book it’s based on long before that, I wonder if The Nothing would have easily triumphed over Fantasia in today’s world. I suspect it would.

I recalled a friend of mine’s toddler who sat in the back seat while we drove to a museum, the toddler’s eyes glued to her tablet screen. How will such a toddler, always enveloped by dopamine-inducing stimulus, ever have time to imagine? It is through boredom that creativity grows. It seems that The Nothing now swallows many of us before we are even old enough to read in the first place.

The Nothing makes us busy, and in its clutter it makes us barren. With more websites to browse, more things to buy, more emails to answer, more shows to watch, more tasks to complete, The Nothing envelopes us in inadequacy. And at the core of this inadequacy is money. Therefore, money is at the core of The Nothing.

The toddler therefore abandons nature in favor of WiFi.

On the other end of the age spectrum is the retiree. Consumed with planning, the 65-year-old retiree is concerned almost entirely with projections. Projections of lifespan, projections of benefits, projections of health. All of these projections gravitate around money.

Whereas they once fretted for their job security and bonuses, retirees soon fret for health security. The primary question of the consumerist model does not fully disappear: Do I have enough?

Gone are simple days spent being. With money having consumed the retiree’s every thought, every worry, and every bit of motivation, for years upon years, the modern consumerist model has completely devoured the retiree’s spirit. Wholly dependent on the system for what the retiree now values most, which is predictability and stability, the retiree no longer focuses so much on what he or she deems trivial: things like creation and meditation. What money, what insurance, after all, are supplied by creativity? Instead, the retiree’s focus is on wills, on healthcare, and on potential future nursing homes.

Burn me at the stake, I say, before sending me to a damned nursing home!

Free from the shackles of work, the retiree is shackled to insurance and rife with anxiety over pension plans. “Will I get my promotion” is quickly placed with, “But will it get me through?”

The what ifs of the working world subside, and the what ifs of the healthcare world infect.

It is no wonder then that so many retirees struggle to find purpose, when in fact there is a thousand years’ worth of purpose in a single ray of sunshine. The retiree’s sole focus for so many decades was on “finally having security” that the act of retirement only breeds more insecurity: a lack of passion, a renewed anxiety over wellbeing, and a focus solely on money.

The retiree, consumed by being busy, struggles to breathe. He or she will therefore often find new things to be busy over, and there is great risk in these things being too superficial to live long for.

The focus for so many decades was on having enough money that money can become the retiree’s primary value. It will not simply dissipate because one is retired. It will instead shapeshift into forms more sinister. The Nothing will prevail.

And in between the toddler that is introduced to a consumerist model of screens, and the retiree fully consumed by the consumerist model of funeral planning and pension spending, are those lost in between, navigating the unknown, figuring out what is truly valuable to them.

Will The Nothing finish them off, or will they learn to read again?

It is easy to be rendered cynical by the hoard, but it is still relatively easy to defeat The Nothing.

Take a moment to breathe. Do nothing, just stare and breathe. Let your mind wander where it may. Don’t look at any screens or the wasteful notifications that blink from them. Don’t prepare anything or mark anything or clean anything or throw anything away. Was it easy? Then do the same, but for ten minutes. Then try an hour. Look at a plant, or an animal. Let your mind wander. Then when you’re done, pick up a book and read a few pages.

The Nothing just shrank a bit.