When Life Happens
all that matters is how you respond
A few weeks back, I strolled into a bookstore and grabbed a couple of books from the second-hand fiction shelf. One of them was Homer Hickman’s Carrying Albert Home. What made me pick that book? Was it the sticky alligator figure on the cover? Was it the implicit parallels with Odyssey that placed the novel in the lineage of classic adventure stories? Was it the way the slightly brownish, worn-out papers felt between my fingers? Was it the bright red sticker sitting silently in a corner on the cover, whispering the two magical words…50% off?
I do not know.
But what I do know is that the book gave me a line that has made me think a lot, witness it in everyday life and forced me to reflect on it over the past few days—
There are times that come to us to accomplish things that don’t make sense but make all the sense in the universe.
Hickman refers to this as “Kismet” in the novel. Where I come from, a lot of people use this word interchangeably with life itself. Is this all that life is? A series of challenges for us to accomplish? Challenges that we can’t even make sense of?
Hickman may have wanted this idea to carry poetic undertones. Unfortunately for him, he found an audience in me, who has draped it in the patterns of gamification.
LIFE: An open-world single-player game where players are constantly tasked with a set of challenges, some connected, some disconnected, of varying levels, with no linear progression, and completely random setups. Each player may have to figure out their own method.
A lot of these thoughts are contextualised by recent experiences. A new city, new work, and new challenges. This is what it means: that if you read the same book at different ages, the meanings of some books change. If I’d read this line at 18, fresh out of school, binge-watching Daniel Day-Lewis’s method performances all day, travelling across the city to rehearse for two different plays, and as I had just sat on the DMRC blue line, grabbed my book, and found my eyes darting across this sentence about Kismet, the essay I would have written, would have been very, very different.
Is it the meaning of the line that has changed? Or is it my experiences that made me see it in a new light? Probably, the latter.
Well, here I am. And the more I experience life each day, when I see others around me finding their way through this wacky open-world videogame, Kismet makes sense to me. What also makes sense are the words of the wise Captain Jack Sparrow:
That’s all that matters: What a man can do, and what a man can’t do.
Such an understanding determines how well we’ll play. A challenge will beckon, and we’ll have to step up because that’s just how the game is set. In our limited leisure, we can always muse on the philosophy of it, the existentialism of it, the mythic origins of this game. But, we gotta keep playing. And find joy in it. Because to find joy is to be free. That’s where our choice lies.
If you think about it, no sport ever really makes sense. A bunch of guys running after a small ball in a huge field makes no sense. In another field, one person grabs a bright red spherical object and throws it at another guy. That guy grabs a wooden plank and swings it awkwardly to make sure it hits that object. And bystanders then chase that red sphere. What? Is this Quidditch on steroids? (for legal purposes, this is a joke.)
But I’m wrong. Sports do make sense. Because we choose to enjoy them irrespective of logic. We choose to find joy in exerting ourselves physically. We infuse them. Just like Sisyphus, who pushed the boulder up, and is happy, even though it doesn’t make sense. We infuse meaning by our choice.
Maybe all human activity is just like that. We are a blink of an eye in the life of the universe, the saga of creation. Do our efforts really make sense, apart from giving us amusement?
We live for the sake of living itself. We’re here. Let’s enjoy our make-believe games while we’re at it.
Did I just echo Albert Camus? Probably. I should get that cup of coffee now, the one he used to keep yapping about.
