If anything, we are pieces of the puzzle of the mystery of creation. Chapters of our lives are filled with scenes of happiness and sadness. Always. So very often, we find ourselves lost in the vastness of creation, not knowing who we are or what we want.
This is when hope seems to be stolen from us. Suddenly, our existence becomes cold, and what was once meaningful becomes meaningless. So is the story of our existence. This is the tragedy of an existential crisis triggered by events such as loss, depression or illness. We are filled with intense fear and ambiguities about life.
Questions such as “who am I?”, “why am I here?”, and “what is the purpose of life?” become all too common. Well, you are not alone. These questions have occupied the minds of philosophers, theologians and psychologists for centuries.
For Christian philosopher St. Augustine, who was at the 393 AD Council of Hippo in modern-day Algeria, which canonised some books of the Bible, God gives us purpose in life. This is because God is omnipotent and exists in everything. So, we are of God. Philosophers such as Plato and Baruch de Spinoza are in the same WhatsApp group.
But existential philosophers such as Søren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were having none of this. For them, life has no inherent meaning. We are plunged into the world with no choice over our birth or death.
Even Kierkegaard, a devoted Christian existentialist, saw it no other way when he said, “how empty and meaningless life is. We bury a person; follow him to the grave, throw three shovels of dirt over him . . .We drive back in a coach, and console ourselves that we still have life long enough to live.” Profound.
So, God created the world with no particular purpose. But even if God did, only God knows that purpose. No one else. If humans claim to know what that exact purpose is, advise them to take a chill pill and softly read Jeremiah 23:16. It will help.
We enter the world with nothing and leave with nothing. It is in between the nothingness of birth and death that we create something to give purpose to our lives.
We are free to be who we want to be, love and live. But this is never an easy decision, because the best choices are better lived rather than imagined.
Never should we feel restrained by the bounds of society, traditions or religion to define who we should be. The truth is, all of these are man’s creation and are we not, in our own special way, also part of man with the same ability to create? Please.
In Sartre’s world, this is living in bad faith. Meaning, a self-deception that we tell ourselves that we have no choice but to live by the choices, beliefs and rules made by others.
Our purpose in life is not given, but self-created. We should write our own book of life, grounded in the goodness that gives meaning to our lives. We should create the warmth that defines our essence in the coldness of existence. Only we, ourselves, can do this.
This is authentic. As Friedrich Nietzsche reminds us, “no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
With life being a passing experience, craving external validation in an indifferent world is only a pathway to more existential crises.
)
Dr Mafole Mokalobe
writes in his
personal capacity.
