To the unconceived, whoever you aren’t,
Do you mind if I tell you what it feels like to be alive? I’ll start from the very beginning.
I was born on a day without color. Or warmth. Most people dislike these kinds of days, but I feel at home. When all vibrancy has been drained from the world, life reveals its truest colors. The budding greens of spring and the fiery reds of autumn are pleasing to the eye, but it is the soulless gray of winter that touches the depths of my soul.
When you’re young, as I once was, everything has meaning. Pushing a shopping cart down the aisle like a race-car (did you know that race-car spelled backwards is rac-ecar?); feeling sorry for the dried-up earthworms after a rainstorm; falling asleep to a rising pitter-patter while in the backseat of your mother’s car — these mundanities, they all have unfathomable significance, so long as they remained unquestioned. And the childish mind, in all its wisdom, questions nothing.
When you’re young, adults will pretend to be smarter than you. You might believe them. Don’t. They are foolish, because they demand to know the meaning of everything. They construct ideologies to prove themselves right, and others wrong. They cry out to a God who they know does not exist. But you do none of this. You simply live. And there is no action wiser than living for the sake of … well, for the sake of life itself.
“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one.”
I was seven years old when I first knew I was going to die. I forgot my fate for a while, but then, on an arbitrary and colorless Monday (or was it Sunday?), I turned twenty. Nobody talks about turning twenty — eighteen and twenty-one are the de-facto landmark birthdays, but it was on my twentieth birthday that I woke up to life. When I was a toddler — even a teenager — twenty felt a lifetime away. To be twenty years old was to have read the universe’s classified instruction manual cover-to-cover. But then I turned twenty, and this all-encompassing handbook was yet to turn up. Not only that, but two decades had slipped through my fingers, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.
This letter will remain incomplete for the time being.
T.W.
Jackson is an aspiring philosopher and nomadic free-spirit. He is currently wandering through an alpine meadow somewhere in Kashmir, pondering the meaning of life. If you would like to contact him, please send a carrier pigeon with a hand-written note, addressed to "The Abyss." He won't respond. (Editor's Note: you can contact Jackson at jlang2@nd.edu)
