contrast

It’s a Monday night and I’m not feeling particularly in the mood to do anything right now. I’m having one of those existential mood swing kind of days… actually, maybe for the past couple of days, though I can’t seem to pinpoint the source of it all. One of those days where I feel like crying but I don’t know why.

To paraphrase something said by Louis CK once, sadness is a beautiful emotion. We focus so much on the pursuit of happiness, the need to feel content with our lives or otherwise get to a point where we can feel content if we’re not, but often without considering that sometimes the sad moments are fundamentally necessary to our being. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I didn’t go through those periods of sadness experienced in the past, honestly. (Of course, I’m the kind of person who tends to focus a little too much on the sad sometimes… I’m drawn to it like a moth to a flame.)

Happiness… or euphoria even isn’t something that just comes to you naturally or normally just like that, unless you’re purposefully being ignorant of the bad in the world today. This weekend felt like a mixed bag because I was feeling cognizant of how I was pursuing pleasure at the expense of being present with people.

I saw bodies in the ground. Selfishness that was celebrated. Judgement while recognizing you were the one judging. Ever since he flashed the red light I've been seeing red all over. You want to just enjoy the moment.

To fundamentally be next to someone and not know him at the same time. That is the tragedy of living the human life.

Back in the college days, I used to idealize this concept of selflessness. That truly loving another person meant being fully present with them, being willing to accept them in all their flaws and virtues, surrendering my own selfish desires for the sake of serving another person. It was the kind of paradigm of living that I saw in Jesus’s life story, a description of the kind of person who I would admire and look up to as a person. I would see these qualities lived out dynamically in some of the people around me and almost idolize them for it.

But as anyone in the church would probably tell you, idolizing anything in this world is a dangerous course to follow. You essentially take something that’s otherwise fundamentally good and turn it into an unhealthy obsession, and left unaddressed with time, that turns into a nightmare of inescapable proportions. And in some cases you start to wonder if your life would be better if you’d never discovered this “good” thing to begin with, if it could somehow also lead to so much bad in your life. [That’s pretty much what the church’s problem with sex has been, for that matter.]

Digression aside, I don’t know how I feel about selflessness anymore… other than perhaps a fleeting ideal a lot of the time. Subconsciously I still value it a lot, which is why I feel so upset inside when I start to see how selfish I can really be in unexpected situations, how I can somehow act apathetically about other people but still feel enough to be bothered by the fact that I'm being apathetic. But at the same time I can see the value of preferring to be alone over being with people sometimes... I've had some of my happiest moments alone, to be frankly honest. And I'm reminded how ironically some of the best artists and workers perfected their craft at the expense of their interpersonal relationships with the people who were closest to them. Did this devalue the great work that they did, the impact that they wound up having on future generations anyway?

You think the world would be better if everyone simply got along and never had to experience sadness or brokenness in their life. If they never had to deal with unfavorable people, never had to go through a period of loss, never had to deal with humiliation and failure and depression and anxiety and suffering at a fundamental level, because those experiences damage the heart and soul and leave behind scars that don’t ever really go away and memories that you wish you could forget, because oblivion is bliss when you really think about it. Life would be a lot better if you didn’t have to deal with shit all the time from other people and your environment and yourself.

But that’s not how the world works. You learn to accommodate the unfavorable experiences in your life, with all of the disappointments and heartaches that they bring, and hopefully you grow from them. The good things in the world will sometimes lead to bad experiences, and the bad experiences will sometimes lead to good things. These bittersweet moments may make me feel sad, but I have to remember that that’s just how they are. It’s okay to be sad for now, but remember that it’s not all just sad in the long run.

Sometimes you have to be a little selfish to really appreciate the value of selflessness.
Or as Matilda puts it, “sometimes you have be a little bit naughty."