Do not let fear destroy you. Strive to always be fascinated by life and the world around you.
by Joey Clark
Much time has passed since my father asked me a simple question, “What do you fear the most?”
My answer has been a long time coming: my ultimate fear latent and left unspoken for most of my life. But recently, this fear has managed to crawl-and-claw out of the depths of my mind and wriggle itself right below my skin, a once vague abstraction now serving as a storm brewing beneath my seemingly placid persona.
I hope you know what it is like to experience a once completely abstract idea becoming a deep-seated reality. Such is the proverbial light bulb flickering to full blast, the first bite of forbidden fruit with the knowledge of good and evil to follow, the discovery of the irony of one’s innate liberty—that we here on earth have no choice but to choose.
Such a discovery is not the fall of human kind. It is a necessary part of our ascent. And this knowledge of our liberty, of our will to know, is liberating. The forbidden fruit of freedom must be bitten if we each wish to find happiness. We cannot shake off the shackles of tyranny—whether imposed from within or without—without first discovering our liberty innate.
Yet, the discovery of our freedom is not all sunshine and lollipops. Freedom can be an arduous challenge. Many people discover this liberty and shudder at what it requires. They do not like the implications, and so they marry themselves to whatever is the prevailing status quo out of a sense of security and false certainty.
To these people (and I am somewhat looking in the mirror here,) I wish to evoke that old chestnut “no risk, no reward” as well as a warning: in shirking the challenge of your liberty, beware the ills of unthinking habit, emotional stagnation, and a forlorn disdain for life in general.
And so, I now return to the answer to my father’s question.
“What do you fear the most?”
In a word: Ennui.
“The only horrible thing in the world is ennui, Dorian. That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness,” says Lord Henry Wotton to young Dorian Gray.
I must say the idea of the one sin for which there is no forgiveness chills me to my very core more so than any other thing in this world. True boredom, existential apathy, and utter annoyance with one’s life: these are the symptoms of ennui.
The essence of ennui is this: to be a slave to one’s own bad faith, to see the promise of one’s liberty and cower at its prospects, to forsake freedom and progress as myths, and to eventually forget one knew these things in the first place.
Ennui is to know the difference between laughter and crying and yet use both as one in the same; it is to treat hope and despair as the same and to see freedom and bondage as equal brothers. Only politicos, sociopaths, and addicts could see ennui as a strength.
So this, father, is what I fear the most. I fear it the most because for some reason my particular personal constitution seems prone to such a trap: the insidious tendency of saying “what difference does it make” becoming life’s credo rather than just an off-handed comment.
I have felt it creep up on my person before, and I commit here and now to never to relent. The birthright of my liberty must not be lost.
I’ll strive to always be fascinated by my life and the world around me–to heed the star dust within and without–and to love my life for its own sake as an opportunity, a promise, and an ongoing challenge to act upon my freedom.
Nothing else will suffice in battling the sin of ennui. Nothing else will do in realizing my liberty’s promise of happiness.
