The Big Empty

I think; therefore, I am.

When I was a child, I used to lie in bed at night and wonder what it would be like to be dead, to no longer exist. I imagined death as a never-ending plane of darkness filled with absolutely nothing, where nothing ever happened, and where I would be trapped for all eternity. The concept of a vast emptiness of non-existence overwhelmed me; it was too much to comprehend. 

Of course, when I realized I’d been mistakenly imagining death as a place where I’d have a conscious mind and the ability to think about my surroundings, I wondered what it would be like to be unaware. Death turned into a place where everything just stopped, where no thought or awareness occurred about my existence or my non-existence or anything else. 

But death isn’t a place; it’s a condition. I don’t think; therefore, I am not.

I could understand why people believed in some form of afterlife or reincarnation. Dwelling on the bleak scenario I had painted for myself about the Big Empty would have driven anyone mad. There had to be more to this notion of death than I knew.

On the other hand, the concept of life before I was born was much easier to grasp, because I knew things had happened before I came into this world. I learned about it in school. I saw photographs. I heard stories. History was real. It recorded the people and places, the art and inventions, wars and plagues, celebrations and victories, and some of the most noteworthy thoughts and ideas from great minds. It was the exact opposite of nothingness.

Meanwhile, I was being prepared for my life as all that history was happening. I was in a state of readiness, waiting to exist. I had no awareness of anything that had happened before I was born and vaguely recalled anything of my first few years of life, yet I took comfort in knowing it existed even before I had existed. History was a part of me that somehow felt tangible.

It’s difficult to reconcile the polar opposites of existence and non-existence while muddling through the in-between. What is the meaning of life? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is my legacy? Do I matter? What value do I have? All of life’s biggest questions had thrown themselves at me in a frenzy, begging for answers; and after six decades, I still have no answers.

I hadn’t given my own mortality much thought until 2020, the year of COVID-19. Social media became a repository for obituaries, chronicling the deaths of people I had known in my past and all the celebrities I had watched on television and in the movies. Naturally, the older I got, the more deaths I heard about, which reopened the door for contemplation of that dauntingly infinite nothingness of death.

I’m not suffering an existential crisis, but lately I have pondered the meaning of life more often than usual, what the end might look like, and when Death might come knocking on my door. Considering the state of the world, one has to wonder why we’re not all having an existential crisis.

If I were to look at the world through the eyes of its creator, what would I see? What would I feel? Disappointment? Sadness? Anger? Are plagues a method of purging the world, of keeping in check the exponential growth of people – people who greedily consume and destroy an already overpopulated planet, who disregard every other living creature upon it? 

Are we the real virus? 

While I am not suggesting that those who have died in any pandemic were targeted because of a less-than-worthy existence, it would be fair to say that “we” in general as humanity’s self-righteous, arrogant, entitled, users and abusers of each other and planet Earth are probably less than worthy as an entire species.

Then what is the point of being here? 

Is the point to get up every morning to go to a job that pays the bills, so you can go home afterwards, eat dinner, go to bed, wake up, and start the cycle all over again the next day, only to dream of getting away from it all? Is our purpose merely to continually fight the corruption, fix the broken, right the wrongs, or vanquish the evil? How do we break the never-ending cycle of war, poverty, exploitation, hate, and greed?

Naturally, I’d like to fix what’s wrong with the big picture, but that’s impossible for one person to tackle alone. There are too many people, each wanting something different. My vision of the perfect world differs from everyone else’s idea of it. As for the things that the majority of us do agree upon, we can face them together.

We don’t all agree on everything. In fact, we agree on very little. No one knows for sure why we’re here or what lies beyond death. I weave my own questions into the stories I write, and like me, the main character in my Traveler’s Saga series questions everything. For example, in the third book, another character responds to her disappointment over not knowing whether something will work, and tells her:

“We come into this life, and the only thing that is certain is that we will one day leave it. While we are here, with certainty, there will always be someone else to whom we must answer, there will always be things we must do which we would rather not, and there will always be people who love us in spite of ourselves. These things are certain. It is the way of life. With everything else, we take our chances and hope for the best.”

Life comes with no guarantees, warranties, disclaimers, or instructions. We try and we hope for the best. That may seem like an over-simplification or defeatist attitude, but that’s really all any of us can do. We do the best we can with what we have, strive to live a better life, and hope that it all works out.

Sometimes that unsecured life can feel like a movie, something you watch rather than participate in. 

When I study people, I imagine what their lives are like, what their daily routines include, what they did as children, and what traditions their families followed. I ask myself, “What do their lives feel like? What are their struggles? What makes them happy? What makes them sad?” Then I examine my own life and wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a different city or in a another family or to know different things or speak another language. 

I ponder a lot of things that most people probably ignore or take for granted. Maybe the condition of the world makes it easier to fall into the state of despair that inspires such reflection, but I’ve always contemplated my place in the multiverse on a deeper level than most. In doing so, I usually come away feeling disconnected from people and my place in this world, yet at the same time more connected to the cosmos in a more esoteric sense.

Not allowing my reflection to pull me down a rabbit hole of hopelessness and emotional depletion is the key to maintaining a healthy curiosity. It’s okay to wonder about death as long as it doesn’t prevent you from living.

We may never consciously know what happens when we die or why any of us are even here at all. Maybe it’s just knowing that there’s so much we don’t know that keeps us going. Maybe we just need to view life through the eyes of a child, like we’re seeing it for the first time, and enjoy it while we’re here.

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