I Am Still Thinking About What Life Means

There are a few things about today I want to remember.

In the afternoon I spent over an hour on the subway to visit the zoo. I saw pandas, penguins, brown bears, and more. Animals are most interesting when they can move around. I don’t support forcing them to perform; I just find it hard to feel much enthusiasm watching an animal listless in a small enclosure. Places where they are active, with someone explaining and engaging with visitors, make me want to linger. I can feel a kind of vitality there. My happiest moment was seeing several people dancing beside the square. Why? Perhaps because they had freely chosen to dance that day. Still, I have to say that spending the afternoon lying indoors would have been quite nice too.

After dinner I watched an interesting film recap. The protagonist attends a kind of self-help meeting and is encouraged to change: to replace the “no” on his lips with “yes.” His life really does seem to change afterward, moving more and more in a better direction. I don’t quite know what I think of stories like this, but I do like them, including Groundhog Day. And there is that film about a man who, in a parallel world, finds that he did not pursue a career but built a life with the person he loves.

I don’t know whether to believe in any of it. Perhaps I judge things too much by their outcomes. I worry that I am clinging to the hope that life might change and, in changing, change me. What if nothing changes? It reminds me of another line by Dazai that I once shared on social media: if there is no fierce joy, grief will not come rushing in either. Schopenhauer thought along similar lines. And watching the recap brought back some of Nietzsche’s thoughts on the Greeks’ turn from tragedy toward comedy.

Later I watched What Dreams May Come. One shot was beautiful; the whole film felt full of meaning. I too believe that death is not the end. Perhaps one of the things I have to learn in this life is to understand that while I am here, and to remember it.

One more thing: that last thought came to me before I fell asleep yesterday. I am trying to arrive at a conclusion, or at least make the words more concrete, and move toward what I hope for. This is not about hypnotizing myself or lying to myself. It is about refusing to let vague thoughts go unattended, letting them become a way to escape, to miss something, or to lose sight of what I am choosing. It is like observing a particle. I know that if I leave it unobserved, there are limitless possibilities. Yet we need the finite; only then is there the infinite. So I want to hold it in place and look at it: toward the place I want to go, toward love, toward wholeness.