Life Will Go On

Life will go on.

I'm not sure who originated the adage, but the phrase sums up a large part of how I have come to view the world. "Life will go on." It's kind of pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. As audible as a sigh of acceptance or lament. A throw away phrase evoked when you need something just a touch more solemn than "don't sweat the small stuff."

A colleague of mine once remarked that I saw the world this way because I was in a position of privilege (class? social?) that allowed me to believe in a kind of salvation or redemption: death and suffering didn't matter for me, because my culture would go on... or something like that. Hmm. Well, no not really. Quite the opposite. I actually believe that I am so small in the grand scheme of the universe that I view the sum total of my life actions (and by extension humanity's) as inconsequential in the continuous gears of time, and if anything I pieced it together from some of my mother's latent Buddhism (Thai variate) that inadvertently bled through the evanglican upbringing I had.

To sum up, I've come to a point in my life where I realize just how finite my existence is, and it gives me a kind of twisted hope. Every read that Ozymandias poem? No? Well give it a try:

Ozymandias

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

* * *

Mighty King and Kingdom lost to time. Yeah, makes me think that ultimately, we're all just spinning our wheels, running around in circles in our lonely corner of space. Maybe, I'm just in denial, but this actually gives me hope for the future. No matter what I try to do, no matter how many people I inadvertently affect with my actions today, no how many of my cause and effects echo down through ages to come, time will eventually grind all memory of me away until not even a memory of a memory of me of eventually humanity as we conceive of it remains.

Why am I not depressed by this? Well, just because the actions of my life, good or bad, great or small will eventually fade out to nothing (or returned back into the cosmos at the most basic elements), that doesn't mean that I should stop caring about the here and now. If anything that makes what my time more precious. Save the world, end the world: in the end the sun is still going to go Nova (or wasn't just a red giant) some day. So whether I work hard to leave an impact or not in a few billion years it won't matter.

Y'all are probably thinking, well, Sean, that sounds just awful, why should you try to do anything then. Well, sure all of us could just burn out to nothing and probably will. Yet, we might as well work to pass the torch. I won't last, you won't either. But the spirit of our efforts can be passed on, and they may fade too, but you might as pass what you can on. Why not give the next generation a good start on enjoying life before they too slip into the void. So, the chain of cause and effect our actions set in to motion still may be ground away eventually by time and spectacular celestial explosion, but have you got anything better to do? The universe would be pretty boring otherwise.

I wondered if this makes me a nihilist. Yet, I do believe life has value. I do believe in love. I do believe in humanity. Maybe it just mean's that I'm no longer afraid of my own death and leaving things undone.