Bearing Life

Milan Kundera points the way to an unusual answer in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

It is a bit hard to classify the book. It is most certainly one part novel; it is also one part philosophical musing. Does the book belong in the fiction section because there is a story which has a lot of philosophical musings in it? Or does it belong in the non-fiction section because the story is clearly just a framework for the philosophical musings? On such questions hangs the fate of my library. But, I digress.

We all know about the burden of life. Life is full of heaviness, those things which weigh on us, which we spend our days figuring out how to endure. Life is a serious matter. What we decide to do has consequences, and those consequences matter. We are often faced with decisions and we don’t know which path to choose, but choose we must and then we must face the consequences of our choices. This is hard. Life is heavy.

There is an alternative way to go through life:

When we want to give expression to a dramatic situation in our lives, we tend to use metaphors of heaviness. We say that something has become a great burden to us. We either bear the burden or fail and go down with it, we struggle with it, win or lose. And Sabina—what had come over her? Nothing. She had left a man because she felt like leaving him. Had he persecuted her? Had he tried to take revenge on her? No. Her drama was a drama not of heaviness but of lightness. What fell to her lot was not the burden but the unbearable lightness of being.

That is the alternative. Don’t treat life as heavy at all. Treat it as light. There are no weighty concerns in life; just do what you will and float though your life never being weighed down by the things of this world. As another character in the story muses:

She knew that she had become a burden to him: she took things too seriously, turning everything into a tragedy, and failed to grasp the lightness and amusing insignificance of physical love. How she wished she could learn lightness! She yearned for someone to help her out of her anachronistic shell.

So, here you are faced with the burdens of life. Do you too yearn for lightness? Before you answer, remember this: if you shed the burden of heaviness, you will forever be tormented by the unbearable lightness of being.

Why is lightness unbearable? It is obviously an odd notion; by definition, light things are easy to bear. But lightness of being is not easy to bear. Why not?

Imagine you are living your newfound life of lightness, unburdened by the weight of the world. You are faced with a decision. You then realize this:

We can never know what to want. Because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives….There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?

That is the unbearable lightness of being. What is your life worth? “What happens but once might as well not have happened at all.” If your life is light, ephemeral, if nothing you do really matters, if no choice has any real consequences, then what exactly is the point? You flit through life and people are born and people die and things happen and none of it really matters at all.

And then you wake up at 4 AM and realize that nothing you do or ever will do has any meaning and the cold terror grips your soul that you are utterly irrelevant, that everyone you meet is utterly irrelevant, that everything you do is impermanent and you can do neither good nor ill in the world, and stripped of all meaning you face another soulless, meaningless day. And tomorrow will be the same.

At that moment, something inside you rebels, insisting that surely everything is not pointless. Surely caring for those you love means something. Surely there are tragedies in life that have meaning, that cause pain. Surely it is not a matter of total indifference whether the box someone hands to an 8 year old kid contains a toy or a bomb.

At that realization, we are trapped back in the heaviness of life. The burden of living returns. Lightness is more unbearable than heaviness. At least with heaviness, there is some importance to the struggle with the decisions of life, some reason that what you do might matter, some hope that you may be able to do something good in this world.

Heaviness or lightness? It’s not a great set of options.

There was, however, a reviewer of this book who offered an interesting third option:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.