If You Have No Dreams…
When I dropped out of paramedic school, I told my partner that I was going to drop off the map and go live in a cave in Costa Rica somewhere. I couldn’t see the point to life. I couldn’t see the point in struggling, chasing, striving & hustling — when in the end death makes a mockery of us all.
One day, we wake up and we find ourselves here, trapped in these little flesh prisons. We bop around for a while, we do some stuff, and then we die. Why?
What is the point of any of it? What is life? Why are we here? What the hell is the point?
And fine, maybe there is no point. Maybe life is just a cruel joke, a sick accident, blind luck, an accidental twist of fate.
Well, what the hell am I doing here?
Bussing myself around a grey city each day, with people rushing past. No matter how fancy their suits, everyone seems more miserable than the person before. And no one seems to notice how weird it is that they suddenly woke up one day and found themselves on a rock, spinning around, doing the same old thing day after day.
If there is no point, just a cruel accident, well what the hell am I doing here?
I might as well be off somewhere, laughing along right back at this cruel joke that is life. Why the hustle, why the strain? When people are going nowhere except straight to their graves. And they don’t seem to see it. They don’t seem to notice what a cruel sick joke they’re part of. They make such an effort to fight off death — to cover it up and pretend it doesn’t exist.
In the same week that my uncle died of a sudden heart attack, I wrote the eulogy for the funeral and memorized the procedure for treating a cardiac arrest patient in the field. What a joke!
We hustle and cramp and strain and pressurize ourselves stupid to try and follow the exact right procedures. We lift, we train, we study, we practice, we cram, and we go in for our exams — all nervous if we’re going to pass, all worried about keeping our uniforms clean and making sure we don’t drop points — pretending all the while like there’s really anything to be done about death.
We put on this elaborate show, this elaborate charade (for the benefit of who?) in an effort to make us feel like we have some control over death. Like we can somehow delay it or prolong it, with our little procedures and our little stethoscopes. HA! What a joke!
What an ultimate exercise in futility. Like our protocols are any match for death. Like anything we do really has any meaning in the grand scheme of things. We’re born, we waste time, then we die.
But we’re too scared and dishonest to admit it. So we come up with elaborate distractions and fancy procedures for not letting the truth of that reality get too close. We put a sheet over a body as soon as it's dead. We pay some poor shmucks to take care of our disintegrating old relatives as their bodies circle the drain and we pretend that we're helping them by keeping them alive a little while longer.
We’ve decided to push death as far away from our consciousness as possible, so that we can forget how weird it is that one day we found ourselves awake, with consciousness, in a flesh prison, on a rock, with no idea what to do with ourselves.
Well I, for one, simply can’t pretend. I, for one, cant simply go through the motions of life — a regular job that I drag myself to each day through the city streets, clocking my time. A partner I tolerate, friends I put up with, and a vacation every once in a while where I drink myself stupid and try to forget.
I, for one, don’t see the point in that. In this infinite cosmic joke called my life, I have no intentions of avoiding death. I have no intention of diluting and distracting myself and living in fear. I might as well dropout, go chill on a beach somewhere, and check out.
Give the middle finger back to the world and meditate in a cave until oblivion calls me back from existence.
What the hell is the point to life?
And if there’s no point, well, count me out.
This was the mind of a young Celeste, circa 2018.
And, as they say, I persisted in my folly. There is a point to life. There is a point to your life. And life gets really good when you figure it out.
Contact me if you want help figuring out what the point is for yourself.
