WE ARE HERE

On the certainty of being alive

One thing is certain...

We are here.
And it will break your heart.
We will die.
And someone you love will go before you.
A mother.
A brother.
A child.
It won’t seem fair.
It isn’t.
So don’t turn away.
Meet it.
And meet yourself
in your goodness,
in your boldness
And know this:
Love
is the light of the world.
Not as comfort,
but as truth.
So love with fervour
into every corner.
We are here.
What else did we come for?

We often say that the only certainty in life is that we will die. Death and taxes, and all of that jazz, if we want to make a joke of it. Fair enough. But there is something rather obvious missing from that account. We are here. Before any question about where we came from, where we are going, or what happens when we die, there is this business of actually being alive. I find it peculiar how readily we accept the certainty of our departure while overlooking the fact of our presence.

We are here, and it hurts, and it is full of joy. Sometimes within the same afternoon. The same moment. You can be carrying something you have no idea how to bear and still find yourself laughing at something ridiculous. You can be grieving and notice the light coming through a tree. Neither experience cancels the other. The laughter doesn’t mean you have forgotten. The beauty doesn’t mean everything is all right. It means there is more happening than your sorrow alone can account for.

I am interested in that. How much of life we can miss while trying to arrive at a conclusion about it. Is it good? Is it cruel? Is there meaning in any of this? These are proper questions, and I have no intention of giving them up. But I wonder how often I ask them as though I need an answer before I can fully participate. As though, once the mystery has been satisfactorily explained, I might finally consent to being here.

Meanwhile, the day is happening. Someone is talking to me. There is something growing outside that wasn’t there last week. My body needs a walk...or whatever. There are things I could do that would make this small stretch of life more bearable, or more interesting, for myself and somebody else. None of them requires a settled account of the universe. They require some attention, and a willingness to be involved.

There is a danger, of course, in saying that how we approach life is what matters. It can sound as though everything would be fine if we simply adjusted our attitude. I don’t believe that. There are losses that no perspective can make fair. There are circumstances we need help to change, and others we cannot change at all. A person in grief does not need to be handed a better way of looking at things. Sometimes they need someone who can sit beside them without trying to improve the situation with words.

But even there, how we meet one another matters. The loss remains, yet the experience of carrying it can be altered by another person’s presence. Someone comes. Someone listens. Someone remembers after everyone else has returned to their ordinary lives. These are things we can actually do. We may be unable to explain suffering, but we can have some influence on how alone another person feels inside it.

When I write that love is the light of the world, that is part of what I mean. I am making a claim about what deserves our allegiance, rather than pretending I can prove love in the same way I can establish that I am sitting here. Love makes demands on how I live. It asks whether I am paying attention, whether I can be honest, whether I can recognise another person’s life as being as immediate and consequential to them as mine is to me. Sometimes the demand is tenderness. Sometimes it is the courage to say something difficult and remain responsible for how I say it.

And there is joy in this too. I don’t want to write about being alive as though it were entirely a test of our capacity to endure. There is pleasure in it. Music. Food. The sea. Sex. The particular company of someone with whom you can be completely foolish. An afternoon that turns out to require very little of you. We can become so earnest about the work of being human that we forget we are allowed to enjoy ourselves. Joy needs room in a life, including a life that has known considerable sorrow.

Knowing that we will die doesn’t tell us how to spend a Tuesday. Neither does it make every Tuesday precious in a way we can reliably feel. Some days are dull. Some are wasted. Some are spent trying to get back to ourselves. I would like to allow for that without losing sight of the opportunity involved. We are here, among other people who are here, for a length of time none of us can guarantee. There is still the question of what we will do with one another while we have the chance.