The Existential nature of living
It was thirty minutes past normal bedtime, and I was standing in line for the Alice in Wonderland ride at Disneyland. My four-year-old daughter was wrapped snuggly in my arms and I swayed back and forth feeling her wild curls blow in the night breeze and her warm cheek press against mine. Hopped up on churros and Disney Magic, we were burning through the last of our energy at the Happiest Place on Earth.
While we waited, I pulled out my phone and dared to glance at the news rolling out of Ukraine. It was as I expected. More senseless loss of life, displacement of families from their homeland, Russian soldiers who have no clue what they are fighting for, and a country desperate to defend itself. I quickly felt the pit in my stomach twist and grow. The weight of my daughter in my arms anchored me as the weight of the world pressed into this moment of sheltered privilege. Motherhood has served as reminder after reminder of the inexplicable fragility of life. It is not just in Ukraine that mothers grieve their babies and fight for their lives.
Sometimes, it seems to take a tragedy to remind us that we are being tailed by the existential nature of living.
In these times, clients ask me the same questions that I am turning over in my own mind. We want to understand how and why to try and reassure ourselves that we have some hand in the outcomes. There is something about becoming a parent that reminds us of just how little control we truly have, and we work to counteract it. We fuss over pureeing our own baby food and avoiding fabrics coated in fire retardant. We buy organic vegetables and stress over what school to send our children to. Yet the world still has the audacity to greet us at the door with its stories of war, climate change, racism, corrupt politicians, and unpredictability. (This is not to say that we shouldn’t make our own baby food if we want or buy the pajamas that are free from extra chemicals. By all means, follow your mama heart.)
But the hard truth of life is that we can be standing in the happiest place on earth, with a backpack full of organic snacks, and still hear the cry of the world that reminds us that the safety and security we believe is a given, was never ours to begin with.
I want to be clear that I am no Zen Monk. These truths are hard for me to face. But they are truths that seem to come around more these days. I first remember reality knocking at my door during the 2016 election. I recall feeling like there could be no possible way that Trump would be elected. I thought, “That is not how the world works. Good prevails.” It was the first time that my faith in the order and goodness of the world was truly tested. It also emphasized what privilege I had enjoyed all those years.
In February 2020, I read news reports of this mysterious thing called COVID and I assumed the media was just blowing it out of proportion. I figured if we washed our hands and stopped panicking, we would be fine. There couldn’t possibly be a pandemic—there never had been. By April of that year, there were many sleepless nights for me. The safety I felt for so many years was being challenged again.
These days, perhaps it is good that I haven’t returned to that sleepy place where I believe the world will hold its center, and all will be well. I have seen the anguish of BIPOC people and know now that my white sense of safety has always been a privilege. To awake to the suffering of our planet and all the human beings that reside on it, is to open ourselves to the inherent truth that life is quite finite and beyond our control.
In my life, I have found many coping mechanisms (some good, some less than ideal) to help me confront the existential nature of life. None have been as freeing as allowing myself to look at suffering without attempting to change it. Reading the news of Ukraine, while holding my daughter, serves as a reminder that I can feel the waves of emotions that suffering brings and still hold the love and meaning of my life closely.
Sometimes people assume that to face the shadowy parts of life, we have to abandon hope and purpose. Why do we insist on living in a world constantly bathed in light and love when we know that darkness and hatred live amongst us, too? Perhaps the call to acknowledge the existential nature of life is a call to a threshold in which we can begin to find meaning in the whole experience of living. Holocaust survivor, and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl tells us that “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
With certainty I can say that life will continue to change when we do not want it to. We will all be asked to face loss in one way or another, and despite our best efforts, we cannot shelter our children from every shadow or harm in the world (I hate writing that as much as you hate reading it). Perhaps the goal of parenting is not to raise children who will be untouched by the world, but to teach them how to be touched by it. Insofar as we allow ourselves the same experience.
Per aspera, ad astra,
Julie