In this piece I describe myself.
The great tragedy of my life is though I can feel and sense it, as I enter my fifth decade, I’ve never been able to articulate what life was or what my purpose here might be. Some idea of it was hidden away in the corners of my mind, scrawled on notes, and sprinkled throughout fading memories of a decade spent searching. But if asked, I would have stumbled around in search of something profound but ultimately shrugged.
Like many modern, working class Americans, I grew up without a faith tradition. My mother pulled us out of church very young, so nothing from the Bible stuck. My parents, supported by the pervasive social channels of the day, did give me strong, distinctly American Judeo-Christian moral and ethical values. But I had no concept of what life itself was beyond the childish mythologies I dismissed, and never developed a sense of purpose beyond my professional aspirations.
That isn’t to say I haven’t searched for answers. I spent half of my 20s “looking for myself”, traveling the world and trying to connect the dots between the physical and metaphysical. Aspiring to live a meaningful and enlightened life, I penned hundreds of pages of dense, technical prose examining the connections between mind and matter. But when I got pulled back into the real world, I neatly filed all of those away in a folder I never opened. I knew that I had hit a philosophical dead-end and conceptually there was no practical way to move forward. So much for enlightenment.
Until 2019 I never made a serious effort at resuming my search for meaning. But disappointment is a great invitation to reconsider your goals, and at nearly 40 years old, 18 months after my company had collapsed, I felt the clarion call to revisit those questions. I was no longer a young, bright-eyed man who used words like “potential” and “enlightenment”; I was a sober, middle-aged man with deep battle scars, some of which were quite fresh. But most importantly, I was wiser.
So I began writing, sometimes referring back to those pages from my years in the Himalayas. But my thoughts were painfully jumbled and verbose, and I could feel the struggle behind each of those sentences. It wasn’t that I was inarticulate, or the ideas were bad. I had been missing something that tied all those thoughts together, related one insight to another, and gave the reader a reason to keep reading. My earlier writing lacked context. It lacked a raison d’être.
Sitting alone in my apartment outside Delhi, less than a week into the resurrection of my spiritual journey, I realized what I had been missing in my 20s. The reason for the dead-end, the lack of context, and the disappointing end to my spiritual adventure to find enlightenment. I failed to realize one thing: I am, and have been my entire life, lost. I don’t actually know where I am. Literally, and figuratively.
I’m surrounded by familiar people, places, and things. I have a familiar routine, goals, and plans for today, tomorrow, and next year. I have ideas and beliefs. But despite all of that, I don’t actually know what and where life is, and by extension, why I’m here and what I’m supposed to do. That’s critical, and forms the context of everything I might want to say on the subject of life.
Being lost is a state of mind, and in my 20s I was certainly behaving as if I were lost, running around the world contemplating the mysteries of life. But as I was examining those questions, it didn’t occur to me that I was writing from the perspective of a lost person. It was a theoretical exercise, not circumstantial. It would be like waking up and going to work everyday without realizing you don’t actually have a job and an employer.
As I revive my earlier contemplations, I do so from the perspective of someone who knows he’s lost. There’s no looming threat of “throwing away my life”, as there was when I was 20. I’ve lived, loved, lost, and won. I’ve seen it all and I’m happy to fully jump off the cliff in search of the answer this time around. In writing this, I am deliberately and systematically pulling the strings that will unravel the entire fabric of my hitherto existence. The first word I typed started the clock on my own extinction. When it is finished, I will be permanently and irrevocably changed in every way that makes me recognizable in and to this world I aspire to leave.
But I’m not frightened. It is answers I seek, and those I have been given cannot satisfy the yearning I have. To find the answers I must surpass the work I started 20 years ago. Fortunately, because I made the choice 20 years ago to embrace this search, I am prepared, and I have in turn been preparing those closest to me. And most important to the honor of the person I am now, I am closing up old wounds and making good on debts.
Occasionally, though much less frequently than before, an old aspiration rises above the surface; a reminder of dreams unattained. They servce to distract and entice me back to the reality I now retreat from. But I do not indulge. They disappear again below the surface, and I continue about my work. The phone and its ceaseless connection to the yelling world, and my various financial and professional obligations are the strongest ties remaining. Everything else recedes.
In this work I describe my journey from ascentism to descentism. My prose, a mix of logic and anecdote, might seems incoherent at times, as if written for some purpose other than consumption by an audience. If you realize this, you are right; I do not seek to persuade, entertain, or even inform. I seek to understand, believe, and become something other than what I was when I started. Should you read this, then I have succeeded, and you may regard this work as an imperfect molt that has perfectly served its purpose.
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