What’s the difference between life and existence? Is it different for all of us or are there patterns that flow through our souls?
Earlier this week I was on a call with one of my closest friends. She does great things leading a global health charity changing the lives of millions. A few months ago she was diagnosed with cancer. On Friday she left the hospital having had three close shaves with death.
She’s one of my best friends partly because of how much life energy flows through her. Another friend would call it a powerful aura. Whatever it is, like a green earth mother, things that she touches grow, change and make a difference.
So it was a shock when she told me that she wouldn’t go through it again. The surgeon told her she’s got a life expectancy of 15 years if she gets cut open from sternum to pubis every 5 years. That means 3 months in hospital hell and then 3 months getting moving and another year of intense work to get her muscle mass and physical function up to spec.
Fuck. How could someone with so much passion for life just say ‘when the bus comes I’m going to be on it, heading for the great tea party in the sky’.
Then my other best friend (the 3 of us are all strategists and we have a weekly chat) piped up and she said “Right on. It’s not worth it”
There is so much more to do. If I look at all the things I want to do, books I want to read, skills that I want to learn, people that I want to meet, I have centuries of life ahead of me. Except that I don’t. How much more of that can I do on a bed in a morphine haze.
I watched the last James Bond film yesterday. I’d had a lie-in and got up at 06:30. I’d spent the day writing and I was drained. None of the family wanted to go to the cinema and so I went by myself. it wasn’t suitable for young kids, I think my youngest two would have been disturbed by it. For me, it was good fun, wrapped up in a love story and a story of emotional awakening.
Let’s call it cathartic because of the intellectual exhaustion that I was feeling. In the end, Ranulph Fiennes read
The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.
Jack London
It hit me quite hard. I had tears running down my cheeks and getting lost in the forest of my beard. Bond lived. The last film took him from an emotionless psychotic killer to someone who was almost a person (limitations of the genre).
He stepped out of the black and white movie and became fully coloured. Now in my life, in your life, how much of it is lived in full colour? How much of it are you cruising along for existence’s sake?
When you look back on your life and determine whether it was a good life what will you say. Will you say
I endured
or will you say
I grew.
I flourished
I lived.
To take the full quote of Jack London
„I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.“
Jack London
That does not say go out and be Jimi Hendrix and or Jim Morrison. We’re not about living a short life full of brightness and energy. I am talking about filling all of my life with that brightness.
Each and every day
Filling it with sixty seconds worth of distance run
Rudyard Kipling, If
What is the point otherwise? Some of us are great. We hit the newspapers, change world events and have books written about us. Bright? Probably. Does that exclude everyone else?
No!
Life and existence is not about who we are or what we achieve. It’s what we do each and every single day. It’s typing as I type now, full of passion and vim, trying with every sinew to cajole and persuade through the words I type.
It’s about committing to the early morning run and climbing the hill in the dawn with lungs slowly growing redder with pain. A thin line of pain in calf and thigh getting thicker and more intense with every step.
It’s picking up a small child and being totally engaged with them, being present. It’s chopping vegetables as you create a moment of taste with love.
I’m not Christian enough to be entirely convinced that there is salvation. Bede’s story of the sparrow resonates stronger.
It seems to me thus, dearest king, that this present life of men on earth, in comparison to the time that is unknown to us, [is] as if you were sitting at your dinner tables with your noblemen, warmed in the hall, and it rained and it snowed and it hailed and one sparrow came from outside and quickly flew through the hall and it came in through one door and went out through the other.
Lo! During the time that he was inside, he was not touched by the storm of the winter. But that is the blink of an eye and the least amount of time, but he immediately comes from winter into winter again.
So then this life of men appears for a short amount of time; what came before or what follows after, we do not know. Therefore, if this new lore brings anything more certain and more wise, it is worthy of that that we follow it.’
I am the sparrow. I am in the mead hall. I know that sooner or later I shall go into the darkness. I’m really not sure if that is ok, but for now, I am going to make the most of where I am. When I go into the darkness it is surely worse. I may be lucky. I play Pascal’s wager and believe that it won’t be.
Until then I want to live. not exist.
This brings us back to my friend. When you are gutted by the surgeon, embalmed with radioactive fluids, corrupted with septicaemia and wracked with pneumonia is that life? Or is it mere existence?
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible
Viktor Fankl, MAns Search for MEaning
I think it can be life. I so much want to agree with my friend, and say no. Life has ended. This is a dreary existence. I cannot cope, there is no more value. That everything shall get worse. It is all downhill.
I haven’t suffered the same way that Vicktor Frankl did. Humans, whether Primo Levi or Guy Sajer go through much (how inadequate is that) and come out transformed or broken
A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important.
Guy Sajer, The forgotten Soldier
So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.”
And yet however bad it has been, freezing on a Yugoslav battlefield, fleeing a volcanic eruption, holding on in a Turkish earthquake, bleeding and lost in the Malaysian jungle, running endlessly through the night in delirium, lost and cleft when struggling with separation, there is always light.
I run not because I enjoy it, but because the suffering makes me stronger, more human, closer to who I want to be.
Arbeit macht frei
Auschwitz Camp sign
That which does not kill us makes us stronger
Friedrich Nietzsche, TWighlight of the Idols
It’s because we suffer because it is hard that we become.
Yes, I can see the dread of going under the knife again. Yes, I can see the fear of losing your body and mind once again, clawing back up to the surface of consciousness and trying to rebuild body and mind so that you can do it again. I fear it. I fear it so much.
And yet is that a reason not to plunge into the icy water? Just because it is cold?
Can we exist without life? For my part, and possibly for my part alone, I cannot see that any part of my existence will be so bereft of life that I will say time to let go.
There will be moments for sure, far out at sea, exhausted it is easy to just lie back, let your arms hang down and gaze into the bright sun. Say ‘I can’t do this. I know.
But I also know that that spark, the life within always rolls us back onto our belly and gets tired arms to start pulling us forward through the sea, towards the shore.
I may not agree with my friend about how the fight should be fought. A valiant clump of slowly dwindling housecarls about a banner, or a flag dipped in submission earlier in the day.
We do agree that until the flag lowers for the last time that we shall live. We shall be meteors to our friends, we shall be a brilliant blaze to our colleagues, we shall bring a warm glow to the world. We have lived.
That is probably enough.
