FALSE PATH

March 13th, 2020

Some depressing subjects are healthy to explore.  This is counter-intuitive with respect to the current cultural prescription to always strive for happiness.  Aside from the fact this mandate is unrealistic, to catch happiness, clap it in mutual irons, and shackle it to yourself for all eternity, it also misses the point.   Happiness is a crippled word.  It serves merely to misguide us.  What we really seek, is to feel alive.

Not only does this light up our memory with those instances when we’ve managed to touch this elusiveness, it’s clear it has less to do with a single high-riding state -like happiness- and more to do with a depth across a spectrum of feeling.

Feeling alive has a lot to do with the way we deal with fear.  Do we ever feel alive when we give in to our fears?  What about when we rise up against our fears?  We wouldn’t necessarily call this happiness, but sure makes damn good living, even if you get knocked down, fail and wonder if it was worth it in the first place.  We feel alive when we summon the courage to get back up and try again.  This has nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with making life worth living.

Side-stepping happiness as a deceptive red herring, we now face fear unexpectedly.  How do we deal with this paralyzing puzzle.

This is why it can be so healthy to explore some depressing subjects.  For instance, what’s worse than failing to face your fear of incompetence, deficiency and defeat? 

Well for one we eventually run out of chances to stand back up and try again.

We must contemplate death in order to override our fear of failure with a greater one:

the fear of leaving life having never lived.