Mandatory Recreation

I've read a lot over of books in search of an answer to the puzzle of life. I don't even think I had a clear handle on the question I'd been asking. I've read the ancient Greeks, Romans, Indian, Japanese, Chinese (or at least Western interpretations of them). Ultimately I always end up at the same point.

It's quite simple, really. Life is 'effort'. You can interpret effort in different ways. Some call it suffering. Some call it struggling. Some call it actualising. Regardless, between who you are and who you're becoming are a series of actions. Between what you're doing and what you want to be doing are a series of actions.

You can huff and puff and bitch and moan. It doesn't matter. You can recall all manner of trauma. It doesn't matter. You either do the work, or you work to put it out of your mind. But what if I don't know what the work is? Well finding out IS the work. What if what I thought to be the work turns out not to be the work? Well that's part of finding out what the work is too.

This is samsara. The Buddhist's eternal wheel of suffering. Round and round we go until the wheel falls off the hub and flies off into the field of Nirvana. Can we not exit the cycle of work? Nope. Sorry. You have to work to exit. Putting matters in Buddhist terms of "desire" (the root of all suffering): if you try to rid yourself of desire you merely desire not to desire. It's an oxymoron. God is to creation what Escher is to art.

This is why Camus calls existence absurd - a Sisyphean tale of rolling up boulders up hills only to watch them roll back down and start over again. Absurd is a key word because of the wide gamut of reactions it elicits from different people. It makes some of us mad. It makes some of us scared. It makes some of curious. It makes some of us laugh our ass off. Watch The Eric Andre Show, and you'll have an inkling.

I've spent such a long time stuck in this limbo between two attitudes to this thing unfolding moment by moment. An astronaut pushing frontiers. An armadillo wrapping itself up in itself. Each frustrated with the other. Space, the final frontier, is scary. An armadillo's life spent staring at its own crotch is not an appealing alternative.