A bit of existential blather

Sometimes, when I hit rock bottom – and I still do – I think maybe writing about it will give it that attribute they call “redeeming moral value”.

I’m not saying anything I experience these days is anything like how things used to be.  I can’t even say my lows come anywhere close to having merit as a real crisis.  It’s a fight with my spouse.  I should be able to shrug it off, shouldn’t I?  Married people fight.  Right?

It wouldn’t even occur to me to make a fuss if I hadn’t recently come home from work unreasonably shaken up.  Our department has had a lot of turnover, and everyone is on edge, but I take things too personally.  That someone freaks out over something that isn’t the end of the world, I ought to be able to say what people say when they're being objective.  But then, who's objective.  Oh, really?  I'm not so sure.

Two people came by at work to tell me not to take it personally.  I’ve been doing great work, they say, and it helped a great deal.  The second night after “the event” I slept.  But I’ve paid my dues already.  I know what an asset I am.  Being reminded by others helps of course.

It’s laughable, of course, for me to call anything I experience today “rock bottom.”  I can look down from my 15th-floor condo onto the street that leads down past the check-cashing store to the place where people can get free meals I have my daily reminder that people who have real problems are the sorts of people who are found frozen a few weeks later.  That’s not me; not even close.

So why do I feel so, so bad?  It was just a fight.

Well, if I step back and look at it, our external circumstances don’t really have that much to do with our judgments of joy and pain.  Tell me I’m retreating into rationalism, but I see the footage of happy street children in India.  I know the miserable, barely-concealed angst on the face of the corporate executive.  Wealth has nothing to do with it.  When you’re down, you’re down.  And when the sun shines or the lizard running down the alley does something funny, it’s funny, even if your next impulse is to catch the thing and eat it.

Humans have this great capacity to live in a fantasy world.  It’s a place where they can be upright and respected.  It’s a place where they can be a loathsome shit.  We can feel happy and secure with our full belly of pancakes.  We can eat brown rice with soy beans and vitamins and still feel like we’re going to drop dead any minute.

What’s going on outside sometimes has little bearing on how we feel inside.

If I was an Alpha Centurian landing on Earth, existentialism would confuse me most I think.  I wouldn’t be confused that - as Gerry Seinfeld says - the owner of the pet walks around picking up the pet’s poop and carries it for him.  I wouldn’t wonder why females shave their legs and Nobel Prize-winning men may or may not shave their faces.

I’d wonder, “Why are you happy?”

And I’d wonder, “Why are you sad?”