Many of us, at some point in lives, will question the meaning of our own existence. And whether this questioning takes a spiritual or more rational form, there's no doubt that this is a natural human curiosity. Sometimes, you catch yourself in a moment of quietness or self-reflection asking the question: What am I supposed to be doing?
I noticed myself doing this recently. Suddenly, it seemed like the colour drained out of all the usual things I found interesting that filled my time. It was as if the point or the meaning of them became lost and, instead, they were replaced by a kind of radio interference that was begging me to fiddle with the dial and find the right frequency so I could hear the message underneath.
I'm still in that void, that place of shadows where time has slowed down and the days don't seem to hang together properly. My mind is either empty or full of the detuned radio chaos. I can't help but think I need a tool to tune this radio. A simple hand gesture isn't going to cut it.
And it got me thinking: How do we solve the riddle of our own existence?
The trick is to look inside. In our culture, there is a tendency to think that we can solve our problems in the external reality - the voices of the world. We live in a society that reveres logical, rational thinking and the science of progress. After all, we have created many great tools and gadgets to solve our problems and answer the question of: How can we make our lives easier?
But what about the great question of existence? Technology is not asking how it can solve that question so there is no way it can provide an adequate answer. So we have to be brave and walk into the dark places, the areas inside ourselves which define our history, our ego, our self and our being. We have to take a walk through the whole of our soul and learn to be comfortable with our own complex characters.
This is a difficult thing for a lot of westerners to comprehend. They dismiss self-reflection and self-examination as futile or package it up into a neat course of therapy or psychoanalysis when really there is no better person to explore who you are than you yourself.
Something tells me that my crisis is calling me to make that journey and that discovery right now. My life has reached a point and a place where I need to really find out a little more about who I am.
I might not like the answers but, if I don't take a look, then I'll never really know.
And that would be a tragedy.
