Even the darkest poems are too pretty

The nature of the universe is laboriously elusive. Save it for the physicists to posit and the theologians to conjecture. We often try to reduce life, the boundlessly vast abstract, into a one line pithy aphorism. Life is this, life is that. Maybe it would be best to start with what life isn't, if such an empirical proclivity were reducible. Wrong question, I say. Let's start with the answers and formulate the questions from there, Jeopardy style. Relationships: What do we cultivate with meaningful objects for utility and/or amusement? Enjoyment: what do we hedonistically seek in itself or as tangential diversion from our primary vocation? Answers: What do we hope to receive by asking questions? Sometimes, asking questions isn't helpful and we must simply assert or become content with the humanity of not knowing. Existentially, questions corrode our curiosity. Progressively, some surrender to innovation. Ontologically, they contribute to neurosis. Yet, we have them to thank for civilization's technological advancement, for hardly has an answer been provided to a question that no one asked. Several centuries ago, Thomas Paine remarked that these are the times that will try men's souls. A decade ago, Brad Pitt's character Tyler Durden asserted that we have no Great War or Great Depression... our Great War is a spiritual war. Out Great Depression is our lives. We don't need to understand Einstein's theory of relativity to decipher this. We live in a New Age of pick and choose religion, even if we or the spiritual merchants don't understand what we're picking and choosing. We live in an age of psychology, in which every perceived pathology that strays from normalcy can be explained away or cured through synthetic (or more recently, herbal) supplements. God is not dead, as Nietzsche asserted or some post-Holocaust thinkers tried to rationalize. No, God never existed until we created God. God exists in our personal projections of the miraculous and abnormal. God exists in the tiny pill consumed to achieve a desired a/effect. Man was not created in God's divine image, but God has been created in man's diabolical, hedonistic, panacean image. Life becomes transcendent when the here and now no longer feel as such. Existence, then, is the passive passivity of participating in what we secretly and consider mundane yet outwardly strive to convince ourselves and others of how special everything is. Alas, we return to life, traversing the tightrope between existence and transcendence. Life is or is not anything. It can be what we make of it, and not what others tell us it is or is not. We tend to synthesize what we hear and read, internalizing those ideas we find helpful and interesting and discarding those that are not. As such, despite our vast similarities, we are all unique in the technical sense of the word. That is, unique meaning dissimilar from any other and unable to recognize kinship. Our experiences, even those shared in some respects, can never be identical, for being reflective beings, what we experience is actually our raw experience of the world. Thus, perceiving through an interpretive lens, no two perspectives are the same. If this discussion seems convoluted and unhelpful, keep reading – not because I promise it will not be either of those things, but because it cannot be anything else, so you may as well see it to its conclusion. And what is that? In an ordered world such as our own, surely there exists some conclusion to this proof of scattered premises. The conclusion, rather, is definitively inconclusive. It has been said that every original idea has been thought by someone else. If this were true, however, innovations would cease to recur. However, philosophically speaking, we have passed through a number of ages, each with its hallmark philosophical ethos to demarcate it on the latter of existential progress. While there is no telling if that latter will ever end, there is solace to be found in the trendy idea of simplicity. As mentioned previously, though it is of little consolation to the insufferably curious, sometimes asking questions is unhelpful and will forthright lead to madness or perpetual discontent when answers cannot be presently discerned. Simplicity the mind to simplify life. Simplify life and happiness becomes that much more obtainable. Is happiness what is at stake? Wrong question. Sometimes, we must learn to just 'be' – to accept our present condition as the best possible experience we could be having and take it as it comes. Planning is only so good as the moment the plan is made. Therefore, accept life as a set of experiences beset solely for you to experience, sometimes with others, other times times by yourself. You are the protagonist of your own life story, as is everyone else. Accept your supporting role in the lives of others and embrace your lead role in your own life. That seems like a good enough road to trod, for sometimes good enough is all we can hope for.