Beyond the want for happy endings
This is an entry from my journal. I comment on how I accept the world as-is.
Over the past few weeks Atlas’ cancer has resurfaced. This time I will probably not be able to do anything about it, though I will still check with the medical experts. The cancer has already grown more than what it was a few months ago when the doctor performed an operation on it. I still take care of Atlas and provide all I can. He is happy, though noticeably weaker than what he was even in recent times.
This is the real world. We long for happy endings. Our stories have them, as do our dominant religions. There has to be something more, something in another place that is better than what we have here. Such is our hope and desire. There is no proof of an altogether different world; a world of pure bliss. We want it to exist perhaps to distract ourselves from the actuality of our condition. Here things are neither purely blissful nor completely miserable. There is attraction and repulsion, that which is beautiful and that which is disgusting. One flows into the other. It is and becomes not, depending on the interplay of factors that constitute the given case.
My life with Atlas goes back a decade when I got him as a tiny puppy. On day one, during our first walk, he stood up against a large, poorly socialised Rottweiler. I remained calm and smiled at his audacity. The other man was struggling to contain his dog and was visibly stressed.
Atlas grew up to be a mighty dog, blessed with supreme intelligence, and independent in his behaviour. He never works for me: he only does what he wants, cooperating with me when it makes sense to him. So he learnt all the essentials of living with people and skipped the lessons for all the tangentially useful tricks. I am a little bit like him and he is like me. The closest I have ever experienced to an ideal friendship between human and dog.
Cancer or not, death is part of the incessant process. The story of the universe is one of dust configured into systems of systems, transfiguring into galaxies and particles alike, all exhibiting the constants of patterns, structure, cause and effect else feedback loops else language. Reasonableness woven into fabric. Such is the living universe of which we are a part. A cycle everlasting, experienced as an organism of organisms.
We suffer for as long as we expect the world to deliver us from one of its facets. Mind without body, good without evil, happiness without suffering, sociability without the messiness of human relations, and so on. There is no pure benevolence as the irreducible quality, no father in heaven as the supreme good, for such a being necessarily is in a mode of being, inclined a certain way, which may then be made manifest as its context-dependent irreconcilable other on a spectrum of preference, inclination, way, or mode. An omnipotent god qua omnipotent cannot be constrained and thus cannot be limited to any one quality, goodness included. Whatever ultimately is, simply is. The mode of being is a point on an infinite line: a presence that is transfigurable.
I will continue to live with Atlas and my three other dogs, Raizou, Meelon, and Oreeon, the way I have done hitherto. We are happy here in the mountains. The dogs run around the slopes unleashed. They are close to their wolf nature, owning to the exposure they get to these open vistas. I, too, have long now rewilded myself because I accepted the world as-is and consequently escaped from the grip of fancy, of the want for happy endings. I am undisturbed by indeterminacy and open-endedness. I do not expect anything and fear nothing. This evening, when the sun sets, we will go for our nightly hike with the same vigour and intensity we always do. And when we cannot do that anymore, we shall do whatever our condition renders unavoidable.