Week 1 - Look Around Your Room

Prompt:

Look around your room and try to find the object that you’ve owned the longest. Write about it. It can be how you first obtained the object, where it came from, why you still have it, what it looks like, how often you use it, what it says about you, previous owners/users, if you were surprised by what it ended up being, if you plan on keeping it with you in the future etc.

Being that I live in an apartment in Hoboken, NJ, and not the room I grew up in, I don’t have a ton of things that I grew up with. I’m sure were I to conduct this experiment at home in Sea Girt, there’d be some significant stuffed animal or old notebook or little knickknack that really spoke to my character.

Being that I’m not at my childhood home, the oldest bit of me that I could find in my current apartment is Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which I read during my freshman year Philosophy class at Boston College. At the time, Frankl’s dogma seemed life-changing. The idea that everybody’s got something individual to bring to the table, something indelible to their character that would be lost forever the moment that person left this earth, was revelatory to me.

The example that sticks out is the story of a man interred in the same concentration camp as Frankl during WWII. The man tried to commit suicide – and understandably so in his Nazi-imposed prison. He sat down with Frankl in a session in which Frankl showed the man that he is the only person who can be a father to the man’s son. Were the man to succeed in killing himself, the boy would grow up fatherless. No stepfather, no uncle or friend, can fill the void left behind by a father.

At the time, this example – and Frankl’s ideology as a whole – excited me. I held onto it throughout the years. The idea that there’s some sort of Meaning behind suffering and pain and anger and hardship, that there’s some Greater Purpose for each of us, is comforting. So comforting that, when I moved to Hoboken, I requested that my father bring me Frankl’s book to serve as a daily reminder that I matter and that I mean something.

These days, I’m skeptical about the naiveté it takes to believe this philosophy. Suffering, to me, seems meaningless and endless. It always comes back, whether you choose to believe that it’s serving a higher purpose or not. It reminds me of a retreat I went on as a senior, where a sophomore in my group – who was the most perfect personification of the label “sophomoric” as anyone I’ve ever met – told me that suffering was important because without “experiencing the lows, you’ll never appreciate the highs.” Which is the biggest load of bullshit I’ve ever heard.

You don’t need to hike down a valley to appreciate the height of a mountain. You don’t need to nearly drown to appreciate being dry. And you most certainly don’t need to experience suicidality to appreciate the fact that you are the only one who can be a father to your child.

Realizing that this is the oldest object in my possession at present, I’m going to take a long, hard look at my library next time I go home to Sea Girt.

I think bringing back a book from childhood like The Hobbit or something would be much better suited to my adult bookshelf. It’d be a daily reminder to hold onto a sense of adventure, to realize that life is full of random hardships that seem endless and senseless and very well may be, and these hardships probably aren’t fair or what you’d expected or hoped for or signed up for.

You might’ve just gotten sucked into them one morning when sitting smoking a pipe, enjoying a lazy evening. And at the end of your adventure there might be treasure and happiness, or there might be more hardship or death for you or the people you care about, but that’s no reason not to push through it, to give up and resign yourself to life in a dimly-lit hole where the world can’t touch you.

I respect Frankl’s ideas because sometimes, it is helpful to find meaning in suffering. But when it’s prolonged suffering that does nothing to help you or those around you, when it’s suffering that threatens to stamp out everything good around you, sometimes its easier to chalk it up to some defective bit of DNA or a misfiring neuron or something rather than the kind of storm that makes a tree’s roots grow deeper and stronger. Sometimes, life just sucks. And it’ll either get better or it won’t, regardless of whether there’s some greater meaning behind it or not.