There Is No Question

Over the weekend I drove to my sister's home in Spencerport, NY—a five-hour drive across the rather boring NYS Thruway.  On the way there on Friday, I was still in workaday mode: brain spinning with endless chatter and fretting about things I could do nothing about while sitting in a car on the NYS Thruway, "seeking" new radio stations every few miles when the old ones gave out, tabulating the number of miles to go with each exit sign.  On the way home on Sunday, however, I'd had two days to rest, play, talk until too late at night, etc., so my brain had finally wound down and was ready for some good, long thinking.  Five hours with nothing to do but follow one thought all the way to the next one, teasing out truths from the chaff of my usual distractedness.  I realized how long it's been since I had the chance to do that.  I'm a Thinker, and Thinking takes Time.  Time without interruptions.  My current job requires constant multitasking, and responding to multiple people who constantly interrupt with multiple demands, so I've had to learn to sail lightly on my brain's waters to keep up.  And I don't shift gears (to mix a metaphor) very quickly.  It took me two days to slow down and sink down again into deeper waters.

What I found there:

For at least the past three decades of my life, I have been unable to find a satisfactory answer to the question, "What is the Point?"  Maybe it's only us chronic depressives who even ask that question relentlessly—I don't know.  Other people I've talked with about this seem to either come up with answers that work for them, just shrug and go on with life when they can't find an answer, or never ask the question at all.  But me, I get stuck.  What is the point of making all this effort and going through all this everything if there is no Ultimate Point?  What is the Purpose to Existence?  I'm using all these potentially annoying capital letters because I'm speaking at a fundamental level.  The level of philosophy and theology.  Not just, "What's the point?" but, "What's the Point?"  And I've studied philosophy and theology to try to find an answer that satisfies me at a fundamental level.  I've read poetry, memoirs, spiritual biographies, history; I got a BA in literature and an MA in Religion studying all this to try to find an answer.  Yet I've never found one that works for me.  And so I find myself back at the same place again and again, stuck in the face of a void of Pointlessness.

It's very hard to feel the fullness of joy in life when underneath you gapes Pointlessness.  I want to feel the fullness of joy in life.  So I decided on my five-hour drive home that perhaps the reason I've never found an answer to the question, "What is the Point?" is because the question is pointless. Not that the answer is, "It's a Mystery."  I've tried that one and it doesn't work for me either.  No, it's that the question itself doesn't even exist.  It's a false question.  Perhaps the reason I can't find an answer is because there is no question.  This is where I start to stammer and stumble, trying to figure out how to put this into words.  I probably can't.  So I won't try.  I'll just go on.

I decided to give up the question.  I'm going to make myself stop asking it—which I'm sure won't be easy since I've been asking it relentlessly for 30+ years now—and learn to exist without it. I can't quite conceive of existence without that question, but asking it sure hasn't gotten me anywhere yet so I might as well try not asking it.  Maybe that won't work either, but it's worth a shot.