New Year Special: What Am I Doing Here — in fiction and reality
New years are great for existential questions.
Existential question alert. Prepare to dive deep into an abyss whose answers are just by your side or nowhere else. Turn away now, if you must, because the night is dark and full of circular existential questions.
Jokes apart, this is a question I ask many times. But I figured new years are an extra special time to get my head pounding with the question — what am I doing here? Well, who knows. Honestly, who does? Everyone is just pretending to know and doing their best.
Sometimes I feel like I’m loafing around. Who am I kidding? When people ask me why I am doing what I am doing, I want to quote Tolkien as a reply. Not all who wander are lost (in case you’re wondering which one it is). Romantic, isn’t it? Well, maybe Frodo (Tolkien’s hero) wasn’t lost because Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings and he’d planned what to do. But maybe not.
Fictional characters are notorious for taking up their own will and going tangent to what the writer has decided. Maybe Frodo was just doing the next best thing — which could mean being stung by a giant spider, being attacked by the Nazguls, or dissolving the One Ring in the fires of Mordor and saving everyone (yay!). At least he got Samwise to hold his back, and Gandalf, and Legolas, and the fellowship (excuses, the name list got too long).
When the final season of Game of Thrones ended, it left fans fuming. The ending didn’t feel satisfactory is what most would say. But it’s fiction, some others would argue. Even in fictional worlds, we are compelled to seek reason, order, and logic. Then maybe that is what we are doing here — seeking reason, order, and logic. If fictional characters have a will of their own, tussling with their creators, then maybe we do too. Who’s our creator, you might wander off — that’s a question for some other time.
I’m trying to get by in the best way possible, whatever that means. It could be making a cup of tea on New Year’s day because I’m too adult now to organize a new year trip (permanently exhausted pigeon — cartoonist Gemma Correll would say). Or to practice Wu Wei, the mystical and beautiful concept of not forcing from the ancient philosophy of Taoism.
What am I doing here? The next best thing after the first best thing, and then the third, fourth, and the fifth best thing. It’s a chain, ‘a great chain of turtles’ Yuval Noah Harari would write in 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.
I’d warned you, it’s circular and it’s existential — which is maybe a fancy way of saying there is no one right answer.
Happy New Year 2079!
P.S. The cover picture is a new year wish written from my non-dominant hand. The Handedness Project is organizing ‘Writing with your non-dominant hand’ in April 2022 where we ask everyone to write or draw something with their non-dominant hand and then post it or share it. It’s a way of looking at the world a little differently than we normally would. Cheers.
