The Heights of Humanity (Part 1)
On the empire of time, and the emptiness it leaves behind.
This piece complements the reflections begun in “A Meditation on Happiness,” but turns them down a different path.
Time,
history specifically,
has become the lens through which human beings measure.
What does this mean?
It means we determine value by time.
The ultimate value — our happiness — especially.
Happiness is the time we put into it,
our participation with it,
for time is what is most valuable to us.
It is non-renewable, for it is ever appearing and disappearing.
We are with it, or we are not,
which is why we value it so highly.
This has become fundamental:
We view not only value but all things through the prism of time.
And thus, time is unjustifiable by reason, by science.
Time transcends reason and science, even space, which endures without us.
It manifests its fundamental value by encountering what’s deepest within us —
our feelings and emotions.
The effects they have upon us: their beauty, unity, disunity, necessity,
that which makes us, us.
All this lies beyond the rational or the scientific.
My very being is at stake.
My being is precious.
I continue to exist or cease to exist.
If I ever want to be happy, I must, at the very least, exist first.
Fuck rationality.
This is me.
I’m at stake.
I’m precious.
My happiness depends on it.
That is the most fundamental thing — the foundation of foundations.
That is what value is, ultimately.
And this feeling of ultimacy — of what is most important —
is bound up with how we understand ourselves.
It’s the very core of me.
Beyond the guts of my insides or the caverns of my mind.
Deeper than that.
It’s the truth of who I am,
the understanding of myself,
my truth.
And I want to feel this preciousness all the time.
I don’t want to lose it.
I want it to continue.
I want to live and enjoy it.
I cannot be without it.
I will fight to protect it.
I will fight to preserve it.
Ultimately, I will lose.
For I am destined to die.
And this is why time is how we measure.
Time pulses through all things:
through phenomena, ideas, thoughts and feelings, impulses and drives,
through all movement, good and bad, all of it.
Human beings are rational animals,
and one of the primary proofs of our rationality is our ability to measure.
And so we measure our actions according to our lifelong battle with time.
We measure and judge the actions of others as well — which we call history.
Our lives are making history,
even if the relevance of that history is limited to ourselves.
Or we watch the making of history,
or recount past events as historical artifacts.
The lens of history is omnipresent, overpowering, ingrained
in the way we reflect on our lives and the lives of others.
It has become difficult to think outside of it — or from a different perspective.
Some have argued this is impossible.
The answer is long,
and would take many words to understand that statement,
and many more to answer it.
I will not answer it today.
But if you’ve paid attention, you already sense my position — and thus the truth.
Let’s look at one of the most important truths each of us carries within:
one closely tied to who we are and the extent to which we can be happy.
Love.
If you fall in love,
you recognize a change in yourself that is important, life-altering.
When exactly the moment was is usually unclear,
but the recognition of it is what matters.
The haziness is part of love’s mystique.
The longer you’re in love,
the longer this realization becomes part of you — and the love grows.
It often blossoms, from being in love to being grown in love.
Pure love at its most ideal:
love because you love,
not because of the moment that made you fall.
But that moment was decisive.
It was the trigger,
the point at which the arrow was drawn, shot, and struck you through the heart.
From this point, your love grows as you partake in it,
until being in love reaches its peak and transcends itself into its more ideal form: love itself.
Both are crucial and transformational.
You might view it as a goal; one that’s worth all the broken-heartedness you may have previously suffered and endured.
But, in fact, there is no point of heavenly apotheosis.
Instead you experience countless moments of interaction, bonding, argument, reconciliation, and all the rest,
which take place along the unending path of time.
Decisions are made continually,
because being in love felt wonderful,
but the hope of mutual growth feels even better.
At each step you decide that it is better to love than to stop —
to grow — rather than let it decay.
These moments remain decisive, more so or less so, every one of them.
They contribute to a relationship that inevitably ebbs and flows,
but always moves along — forward into the future, or halts.
Your love is understood within the framework of time.
Love’s history weighs upon you.
Its history keeps you loving,
keeps you attached,
keeps you from letting go,
keeps you hopeful for the future,
keeps you appreciating the time with your lover every day.
Whether the relationship persists or ceases, grows, or decays,
you’ve made these decisions.
You’ve likely even said to yourself,
We’ve been together now for such a long time.
History is time.
The scales of yes or of no.
This is how you have learned to see the world.
It holds true not only for love and happiness but every other value, too.
What does it mean?
What consequence, therefore, do we face?
It means that time has become the ultimate value,
the value of values,
the meta-value.
As such, we are forbidden evaluation of its worth.
Why? Because worth itself is based upon time,
making such an evaluation circular.
This holds true not only for your values,
but also for your fundamental feelings and passions, even your intuitions.
All of these are revealed now as empty, hollow.
Meaningless.
Those qualities that make you, you, are nothing.
You are nothing.
That is the consequence.
The philosophers spent thousands of years fighting the body,
on the observation that bodies begin from nothing,
come to be and pass back into nothingness.
They longed to grasp what is eternal.
Unable to grasp it, they turned their crosshairs on feeling, emotion, mind —
and ultimately replaced God with time.
But time is without meaning or actual substance.
We’ve imposed it onto reality.
An invented measure, a constructed metric,
a tool of those in power to control the lives of others.
It is the very thing those philosophers deposed God for.
And in so doing, everything collapses into void,
without content, lacking purpose.
This is what it has meant for us to make time the metric of our age.
If nothing means anything,
can you still chase happiness?