theories of actualization and realization

another conversation, over a breakfast of whole-wheat bread, sausages, rocket salad and poached eggs:


If life is a gift that no one has asked for yet is thrust upon all of us, do we not have the right to reject this gift? As girls reject chocolates from boys, or as boys reject flowers from other boys, because the acceptance of a gift would carry some form of attached meaning - acceptance (of the gift) and subsequently expectation (what the gift signifies, what the gift alludes to).

The acceptance of life as a gift would also carry a shared albeit dissimilar weight. The weight to live up to this gift, to make the most of life, to at least not waste it. But if this gift of life is one that none of us have asked for, surely we have the option of rejecting it, to make space on an already rented-out planet for someone who could do more with this supposed gift?

This is not to say that I am ungrateful, I understand life for what it is - and I believe it brings with it more good than bad, although this perspective might shift if for instance you asked a young girl forced to bear the child of her rapist if the overall good in her life outweighed the overall bad. The rejection of life is often seen as a deeply philosophical question, perhaps it is because the act of taking one's own life is such an empowering one.

Empowering. Strange choice of words you might ask but what could be more empowering than holding everything in your hands and then choosing to let all of that go? Some may say that this deed is in fact the opposite of a noble autonomous act, that it is cowardly and irresponsible - especially to those that they leave behind. And that it is selfish, this point surfaces time and time again, that it would be a completely self-serving, narcissistic and selfish act. If the rejection of life is a selfish act, could it then be fair to argue that the creation of life is perhaps an equally or even more selfish act?

To force a gift upon someone who had never asked for it. To force upon them so much which they had not asked for, to force upon them so much which you yourself have not come to understand. Why is it that the magnitude of this form of selfishness is not more readily realized whereas its lesser form is vilified?  The rejection of life is after all, wholly dependent and preceded by the selfish act of creating life.

Some might even say that it is liberating -  instead of resigning yourself to a life you've never asked for, instead of watching the years slip by ever faster and having the memories deformed into something weirder each time, instead of accepting a state of passivity, instead of all that you make the choice to recognize life for all it is, its vast potential to hurt and then reconcile, to heal and to scar, to bring great joy and great validation and you accept all of that. To accept all the vagaries of life, and to still choose to put it away. If all of us die someday, and most of us die before we want to, how can you dismiss the individual who chooses to die on its own terms, and by its own hand?


So, she says, chewing on some rocket, What you're saying is that beneath our veneer of fake importance and the desperate need to validate everything we do, life is in fact meaningless? I do not know for a fact if life is meaningless or not. What I do know is that by assumption the converse of meaningless would be meaningful, and from that word you would extrapolate feelings of gratification, fulfillment and the hazy, linear feeling that we are all headed somewhere, for some significant reason and that all of this amounts to some great thing. And in that sense I can say while it may not be meaningless, it is far from being meaningful.