i’m anxious. i’m in danger of despair.

i was dancing in my room this morning. yeah i know it sounds childish and immature, but the definition of maturity itself is so vague and my personal views towards maturity has a definition that only i can understand. and so far i am satisfied with it. anyway, dancing in the morning really gets my mind going, and this nonsensical writing below, is just one of the many examples of a adrenaline rushed mind. a momentarily happy mind.

-

do you know that feeling you get when you see a view, a beautiful view of nature and you try to say something wise and intelligent but only petty little words come out? words that undermine the beauty of what your eyes astonishingly see. a view that only the suprarational being, the grand architect can construct and when you view this view, this beautiful view, you find yourself so immersed in it, your emotions start to take over, you feel glorified, you feel content, you feel at peace.

i have this feeling every time i go somewhere new. but this feeling of bliss is not without its questions.

these views of beauty that i have happily seen, has unwillingly forced myself to ask a very simple question, a question that many of us have come to ask from time to time. a question that holy books have tried to answer but have come up, in my opinion, with only mediocre answers, answers that often only the most faithful have come to mindlessly accept. and that question is a complex yet simple,

what is the purpose of our existence?

i hate the fact that many us see our sole purpose of living can be easily divided into two groups, those who are good enough will be sent to the heavens above and those unlucky men and women with chronic behavioral problems will be sent to deepest pits of hell. is this our true purpose here on this planet? the grand struggle towards eternal happiness? is our God really that shallow? do we only live for this? promises of eternal happiness after dying, something that we even do not know, is true, is there.

why? why is it that simple? i feel so useless understanding such a thing. my purpose of existence here on this dying planet of ours cannot be that simple. i feel so meaningless.

Jean-Paul Satre had a rather exquisite point of view towards our existence (or in philosophical terms existentialism) “existence precedes essence”. what he meant by this is that, we humans do not have a predetermined essence the way, say, a chair does. We are indeterminate, always free to reinvent ourselves. is this true? our purpose in life is determined by us? perhaps it is.

perhaps i have a purpose then. no, it is not the heavens nor is it money. it is my love for humanity itself. i will make this my purpose in life. to merely fill my life with just a purpose is useless, that purpose must be noble. What use is my purpose if my purpose is purposeless? my happiness must be shared, because happiness is only real when shared. and that seems to be a rather nice purpose of life, at least for my life, don’t you think?

these voices in my head keep asking “why?” and i would like them to stop. just for now.
please.

oh mother Mary..what is my purpose in life?

because i could not stop for death

Looking past the deaths of those whom i have seen, there is one particular death that has made a rather unforgettable mark in me. It was not the death of a loving family member nor was it the death of a dear friend but perhaps to your disappointment it was the death of man of whom i do not know the name. A man whom i last saw was struggling for his very life, while being drenched in the tears of his loved ones.

Perhaps an ordinary human being would at least have the slightest emotional memories of the deaths he or she has encountered throughout his or her life, such as the death of the man above, which will eventually lead to some sort of temporal emotional instability, but when it comes to death i as a man whom i see myself as sometimes emotional have become somewhat acquainted towards death itself. I am more touched by the suffering of the living.

When i see a person’s death my heart is not touched by the soulless body but by the grief of those who are suffering due to the hollow body. I am emotionally blunted when it comes to death. But seeing the process of dying itself has made me ponder towards death and i can thank this to the man of whom i do not know his name.

- written in the emergency room, in a hospital at Bandung -

it was late at night, my girlfriend had a high fever, i decided to take her here, she did not look well. i took her to the registration counter. i let her be filling in the forms and answering the questions needed. i turned around curious of this room we were in. i saw a man. he caught my attention. he was laying on a bed, he looked very ill. i stared. i listened. i shouldn’t have.

his heartbeat dwindling, pumping slower and slower, an alarm squeals through the air, a straight green flat line on the monitor of a machine, a nurse giving CPR, a wife crying in despair screaming the word no with all her might, a doctor shouts vee-fib, people backing away, clear! shouts the doctor, no response, the doctor tries again, no response, the doctor tries twice more, yet still no response.

the man is dead.

lifeless yet still warm. a wife and a child crying, all seems to be in slow motion. i stared, i shouldn’t have. the child looked at me, eyes full of tears, my heart tore. the curtains close. yet i am still standing in shock. i am still staring. i shouldn’t have.

and now i am afraid. frightened by death. the process of dying, and of what we will become after death.

- end -

Death, whether we are fond of it or not, is something we have come to accept. Or perhaps forced to accept. do not deny this, we are all afraid of death, whether it be the process of dying, the suffering of dying, or what will become of us after death. we have invented drugs and machines to comfort us when we are dying and we have also invented religion to comfort us as well. telling us that there is eternal happiness after death, or even eternal damnation if we are not playing nice.
i hope this is true. i maybe religionless. but alike any other selfish human being, being given expectations of eternal happiness after death has made death a bit more acceptable. if we could not find peace happiness now, perhaps in the afterlife there is.

i close this note with a poem from one of my favorite poets,
Emily Dickinson entitled Because I Could Not Stop for Death.

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

- Emily Dickinson

she died i my hands