I’ve been spending so much time on my project as of late. The attempt to finally write “the story of my life,” which I’ve made a conserted effort to make some progress on in 2025. Sadly I’ve been neglecting this space because of that.
Thus I figured I’d give myself a needed push and force myself to put the draft of a potential introduction somehwere where it can perculate. I’ve found myself going over the same sections again and again, always making changes and edits, which is a never ending excercise.
Thus this is a place to start. A chance to move on to a different section.
A Story of a Life
I’d like to tell you a story. My story. The story of a Life. Or more precisely, I’d like to tell you my story. The story of a mostly failed attempt to make sense of a life.
As I write this, I am approaching 50 years of living my story.
50 years. Somehow I blinked and inadvertently found myself in unfamiliar territory staring back at a reflection I don’t quite recognize and grappling with a world I no longer understand.
And if I was wondering where that leaves me in answering the question “am I officially old yet,” the giant billboard I drove by the other day advertising the 55 plus “seniors home” made this abundantly clear. When the next decade includes paying off your mortgage, qualifying for discounts, and potential qualified retirement, you know there are far less years ahead then lie behind in the ever present wake that is this veritable fever dream now tumbling me headfirst towards official “seniorhood”.
What have I gleaned from all this time spent occupying this body I somewhat reluctantly call my own? I’d say there’s little I’m confident about in this world. Even less that I’m certain about. However, I have found a single, simple idea keeps imposing itself on me over and over again over the years, if taking slightly different variations and iterations through the ensuing decades. An idea that feels necessary to any attempt to begin to try and wrestle down this thing I might call a life.
That idea is simply this;
Life and death are fundamentally different things.
Cue, in my experience, the ever dependable side eyes and raised eyebrows and general looks of befuddlement and puzzlement.
Huh? Can you repeat that? I’m not quite understanding.
Bear with me now, as this will appear to get a little heavy and dark, but, and trust this is my intent, at least in my mind, this is going somewhere other than functioning as a general punchline for my notorious ability to confuse and confound. Such is the nature of my story, or at least the nature of any worthwhile beginning. As I heard it put once, all good stories must begin in the dark.
How about we go with “all necessary stories.” For me my story is, quite literally, a life and death matter after all. I wouldn’t be here without it.
Now back to the matter at hand. As I was saying;
Life and death are fundamentally different things.
Simple? Obvious? None of the above? Perhaps it should be surprising to note that my fervent commitment to this single, simple idea has brought me more grief over the past 10 years or so than I’ve experienced over the preceding 40. However, at this point in my life I am no longer surprised, I have learned to expect it in fact, and even to invite it. In truth, I find the idea difficult to communicate, impossible to explain. And I find it to be an idea that seems to consistently evoke strong reactions, resistance and emotions across a wide range of people, beliefs and personalities.
It gets even worse when I speak of life and death as not only being qualitatively different things, but reflecting antithetical realities. Nothing gets a certain subset of people more riled up than the appearance of an imposing binary after all. I am part of a world that has quietly (or not so quietly) grown suspicious of binaries, even when unaware that these suspicions exist. Rightly so to certain degrees I suppose. That could (and should… yes, I do should on myself a lot, as my counselor would say) occupy its own conversational thread all on its own. And yet, to lose the language of binaries entirely means to reduce the conception of a life to mere utility.
Here’s the thing. Without these binaries we cannot move to say anything at all about what that utilitarian picture reveals, because to speak beyond the terms of utility, which defines the world according to the measured outcomes of a purely functional reality, means assuming the position of an interpreter. And any and all interpretation aims towards the formulation of true beliefs.
The working assumption here, albeit I believe a justified one from my point of view, is that our particular convictions, the things that allow us to live in this world as meaning making and/or meaning sensing creatures, matter to our pursuit of knowledge. And knowledge, albeit a term that should have (there I go again) its own needed definitions and conversation as well, is what allows us to make sense of a life not just in practical terms, but in “logical” terms
In other words, the point of any utilitarian observation is to bring us not to our observation of a functional, material reality; that would in fact be bringing us nowhere at all. The point of any utilitarian observation is to bring us to a proper logos, or to proper knowledge of a world in which we find these essential observations.
It should be stated, and restated, by and large the idea of certainty is a fallacy. True beliefs are not the same thing as certain knowledge. To borrow from a surface level online definition, true beliefs are “states of mind where a person holds an idea or proposition to be true in a way that corresponds to reality.” Note the differentiation there between reality (what we observe and experience in a demonstrable sense) and the corresponding belief that one forms based on this encounter with reality. True beliefs are not certain knowledge, rather such things require us to name that which a given perspective holds to be true on logical and reasoned grounds (our convictions). And the formulation of these beliefs is what sets us in relationship to a world in which people have different convictions than our own Hence why binaries matter.
Which is another way of saying, a life cannot be lived apart from such a binary, if by binary we mean the relationship between different interpretations of the same shared (observed and experienced) reality.
What we hold to be true is that which informs our unrestrained and uninhibited participation in this world. In other words, true beliefs must always be qualified as an act of faith. Not faith in the common westernized notion of “blind belief,” but faith in the sense of allegiance and trust. Knowledge in this sense comes through these acts of participation in the world we observe and experience. And it is this participation that is enabled by such binaries, and indeed makes these necessary binaries aware. They are, to put it bluntly, as necessary to a lived life as breathing.
Anything less leaves us stranded and lost in the uncertain space of this existence without a way backwards or forwards or even into the conversation. As someone in my life once said, to reduce a life to its utility is to reduce a life to its futility. A life reduced to its utility is a life that functions without an end, or that isn’t honest about its ends. It remains the shell of an uninterpreted life which is cut off from the logos that enables it to be known, and ineed to be rational. It is a life that exists without any proper sense of attained coherency or justification. It leaves us enslaved to the constructs that utilitarian approaches uphold and make authoritative.
Or perhaps more to the point, to reduce a life to its utility leaves us distanced from the necessary conversations that allow a life to be truly known. And if that is the case, it is equally true to say that it leaves us with no way to distinguish a life from a death.
Now, this should come with a necessary clarifying point. When people hear the word death they typically jump straight to the narrow and truncated conception of death as non-existence. They think of that oft named only true certainty in life apart from taxes: which is the simple fact that we are all going to die
That’s just the stuff of life, as they say.
To be clear, that’s not precisely what I mean by evoking the word death, at least not exclusively. What I mean by Death, which I am now capitalizing here with intention, is a kind of reality. A capitalized form of the word that encompasses the way things are. A state of reality. A way of explaining and defining that reality in all of its uncertain terms. Death includes but is not limited to the following: suffering, decay, oppression, disorder, violence.
In this capitalized form of the word, Death is a way of qualifying all that Life, also capitalized with intention, is compelled to respond to, intuitively so, from its own distinct vantage point. It is that vantage point that is able to say, we find Death in this world, and we also find Life. It is to be able to say, this is what I experience as qualitatively wrong in the world and to live requires me to act (not just exist) in response to such things.
Thus rather than reducing this existence to such trite statements as “that’s just life” or “that’s the stuff of life,” to me the only real and true coherency available is found in our ability to actually name that which Life acts against. There is a reason a life reacts when certain things are imposed on it. Life is, properly rendered, most clarified in the trenches of our participation, precisely because, when examined honestly, this participation allows us to name and thus to know and recognize that which belongs to the category of Death.
Or in other words, it defines the finite form of our existence.
In even more words yet: it comprehends this finite form through the lens or language of loss.
There is a reason I am beginning my story here. To see and to name Death is to recognize that essential defining trait of Death: finiteness, or loss. To then see and name Life as a qualitatively different thing than Death is to name that which is present, not lost. But, and I think this is a crucial point, the present isn’t simply defined as that which exists in “the now.” It is more than this simple statement of fact. It is, in fact, to name a kind of reality in a qualitative sense. The present isn’t simply contained to what is, it is qualified as the nature of being. It is a qualitative element of this world that functions in accordance with the nature of a life. For Life to cease to be would not primarily mean that it ceases to be present, but that it ceases to be what a Life is. Thus its possible for existence, or reality, to be something without the presence of Life.
To this end, it should be simple enough then to say that Death is what robs the present of its essential, qualitative nature. It is not simply that a life exists, it is that it exists in a particular way, acting as it does against the forces of Death. This is as fundamental to our need to oppose such things as suffering. It is as fundamental to our need to fight against the ravages and dangers of decay and disorder and violence and disease as it is to our need to define the present over and against that which robs the present of its unique “presence.”
Here it deserves to be repeated: loss is more than non-existence. Rather, loss reflects how it is we experience and name Death in this world in ways that are differentiated from our experience of a Life. Loss comes in many ways, shapes and forms, but all of these shapes and forms ultimately just reveal precisely how it is that Death acts contrary to and ultimately defeats a Life. To see it in any other terms is to not be honest about (or aware of) how this reality works. More importantly, all of these shapes and forms ultimately reveal the true nature of what Life is. There are those who will react strongly against such terms, but it is possible here to suggest that the simple presence of Life reflects a necessary reliance on the language of the eternal and the infinite, as this is the only way to distinguish a Life from the finite nature of Death. Even someone like Einstien understood this by looking at the shape of reality (see the book I Am Part of Infinity).
Perhaps this is why people react against this idea so strongly. If the narrative we bind ourselves effectively states that in the end “Death wins,” or if it concedes that “Death is necessary to a Life,” far better to romanticize and normalize Death than to grapple with the idea that our observation and experience of a “lived” Life actively betrays this conviction. That’s the true irony. In a way such narratives are evoking the very same fear based response that they often accuses appeals to the infinite or the eternal of using as a crutch. Such narratives move to accept the thing Life is inherently afraid of, but do so by reformulating it into an illusion which seeks to disguise the thing we are ultimately afraid of. It becomes a way of convincing ourselves we are still on the winning side of the equation and that somehow and in someway all of this still makes some sense despite of the fact that we are, categorically, not on the winning side of that equation.
This is the sort of approach that believes popularized phrases such as “less suffering is better than more suffering” can actually be logically coherent when framed within a Life that effectively works to oppose suffering in a qualitative sense. What that phrasing actually means is, “I don’t believe this world can exist without suffering, therefore I don’t need to logically justify the grounds by which I move to say some of this suffering is unqualified for a lived Life.”
Which just goes to show, such phrases and rhetoric deeply misconstrue and misunderstand the real issue. The real issue that this poses to the conception of a Life is both a qualitative and a logical one. Life, properly named, opposes Death precisely because it is qualitatively defined as a thing that causes “suffering” in a way that inhibits a lived Life. It might be true to say that a world without suffering is not possible, but that doesn’t change the logical problem of such an observation when set against how it is that we live in this world. It doesn’t change the fact that the way in which we live in this world reveals that Life and Death are qualitatively different things
Views that assume Life opposes “oppression” when oppression is a natural and inherent part of Death. Views that strive to eradicate disease when Life cannot be differentiated from decay. Views that fight for order when the disorder that Death inhabits is deemed part of the proper order of things. It is easy to see how such cognitive dissonance can and must be reduced to its utility in order to be entertained. The problem is, while this approach has become common in the modern West where such utilitarian philosophies run amok, very few people actually live as though this is true, if any. This is as easy to observe in the world as the screen I am typing these words on. When we romanticize or normalize or delegitimize or disqualify the particular nature of Death on the basis of rejecting such a binary, we are in fact defining a Life in a qualitatively different way than our actual lived lives bear witness to. Which is why all of this so easily collapses into one big existential crisis.
This one thing I know: life and death are fundamentally different things.
I would also want to be clear on this front. To recognize that Life and Death are fundamentally different things doesn’t mean living as though Death is not a qualitative part of this reality that we observe and experience. Quite the opposite. Our ability to differentiate between these things is the only way to truly attend for a reality in which it is very much “a thing.” It is in fact what allows a Life to respond in ways that are rational and coherent and in line with its own nature, precisely because it can name and thus recognize what Death is.
Yes, the living can grow, change, learn. The living can incorporate all manners of practices that help us deal with the reality of Death. We can incorporate tools that allow us to reconstitute it within the fabric of a Life in ways that awaken us to the promise of newness and hope. But we do so only because we experience Death as an intrusion into that which is true, good and beautiful. That is the necessary foundation that allows it to be logical. To romanticize such things, as the world seemingly is want to do, is to mistakenly see these things as “just life.” This makes our attempts to then act in ways that are opposed to suffering and oppression and violence and disorder, the things that a Life strives to live against, irrational and incoherent. Nothing more than a means of making us feel better about a reality that is fundamentally otherwise. It is to bind ourselves to an illusion, a lie. To name Death for what it actually is- DEATH- is in fact to say that suffering and oppression and violence and disorder are things that Life must by defined against.
Welcome to the necessary binary.
In fact, I would go so far as to say I have the same reaction to people who philosophize Death away in such a fashion as many have towards Christians who sanitize Death away with “everything happens for a reason” type sentiments. I’ve had enough encounters with Death over my lifetime to know that non-existence isn’t the true fear. The true fear is the way Death transforms our understanding of a Life. The way it throws the nature of a Life into question.
It’s no wonder then that one of the longstanding critiques of Western society is that it has no real, coherent definition of a Life. All the scientific advancements it claims has elevated it beyond the prison of our primitive past has been left unable to define this most basic and fundamental part of existence. Why? Because it has made Life synonymous with Death. Such a world, one reduced to its utility, can never actually arrive at a proper definition of Life, because Life is antithetical to Death.
At one of the most crucial intersections of my story I found myself coming face to face with this reality. It wouldn’t be until much later that this would truly begin to make sense on the level of its logical implications, perhaps most definitively when I read Robert Rosen’s book Life Itself, a book that notes the issue and tries to recast it, problematically in my opinion, within an appeal to complexity (which in my opinion is an ineffective catch-all response that was popularized by the Positivists in the crowd to deflect from rather than engage the problem head on). It is something I knew to be intuitively wrong with the modern worlds senses and modes of reason very early on. But for the moment I digress. Back to the central point;
This one thing I know to be necessary to my ability to entertain any of this: Death is not Life. Death is in fact antithetical to Life.
An idea that has brought me more grief in my lifetime than anything else.
An idea that has brought me face to face with one of its most prominent features: loss.
As I approach my 50th year, one of the most visceral experiences I have of this overriding sense of loss that continues to invade my life has me reaching all the way back to my childhood. Perhaps our first encounter with loss is that familiar notion of a loss of childhood innocence, and it is that sense, that awareness that has been creeping its way back into my adult senses as of late. I have found myself wondering, something I’ve been doing a lot of lately, whether this loss of innocence that we experience growing up into adulthood doesn’t really become fully aware until we start to feel and sense the loss of adulthood as well. We talk a lot about change being the one constant in Life, but what happens when we wake up one day in an largely unfamiliar world that has seemingly abandoned us to that stark and very real sense of irrelevance, left to wrestle with a Life that seems to now be held captive the past. It’s one thing to lose this sense of childhood innocence when you are told by the influencers that be that you have your whole Life ahead of you, whatever that means. It’s quite another to make sense of this Life when most of it lies behind you, whatever one means by that.
When all this change reveals a different world than the one you once believed to be true. When that trust that you had in the forward movement of a Life is suddenly exposed for what it was all along- the forward movement of a Death. When a world you’ve inadvertently been taught to reduce to a matter of utility and function that can be manipulated towards unnamed and uncertain ends has now in fact been reduced to those same material ends. When it feels like that gradual process of Death that invades a Life has been slowly eating away at that persistent and defying sense of innocence that we had forgotten still existed.
Disenchantment.
Disillusionment.
Give it whatever label one wants, the result can be the same: a growing and inevitable cynicism and rejection of all the world’s constructs.
And perhaps the worst outcome of all: what happens when we are left with a Life that is now held together by that slippery and illusive thing we call memory. Memory that only serves to capture that inevitable tension between what is real and what is not. Memory that leaves us uncertain about whether we can even tell the difference, or if we were ever able to tell the difference even while we were living it in the present.
Uncertain about whether we would want to tell the difference even if we could.
Because to do so would reveal the ways in which Death wins. Death always wins. And not in the sense of “ceasing to be present.” That could be argued in some respects to be a grace note in a given reality. But wins in the sense that it reveals our lived Lives to be built on illusions, not reality.
As it is, the subject of memory will come to play an incredibly important role in my story, shaping me within one of my key points of crisis and onwards into a kind of reclamation of some key facets of my life which I had to learn how to reclaim and hold on to, often with a sense of real defiance and persistence towards my own cynicism. In many ways this was a move towards reenchantment, but in a way that exposed one of Death’s greatest magic tricks: convincing me that this enchantment, this sense of wonder about a Life, no longer existed. Or worse, that the only way to gain these things was through the art of successful manipulation. Turns out Death hadn’t defeated it after all. That will be an equally important part of my story.
A story of a “mostly” failed attempt to make sense of a life.
Forgive me again if all of this appears dark or self indulgent or hyperbolic . In truth, I’m used to the responses such thought exercises tend to evoke. It comes with the territory when you are someone who appears incapable of ordinary conversation. Who has a knack for turning any given outing into a targeted existential crisis within minutes. To be fully honest, these tendencies and thoughts have always been a part of my essential fabric of being ever since I was a young child. I remember the first time I picked up Charlotte’s Web at around 8 years old and being struck by these sorts of paradigm shaping questions regarding the nature of a Life and the nature of a Death. I remember feeling the desperate need to wrestle this darkness down into something I could make sense of. This tendency remains. Having recently finished a book by Donna Freitas called Wishful Thinking, whom confesses a similar love/hate tendency towards finding herself forever mired in that perpetual existential tension and state of cynicism that questions everything and is given to restlessness, I can’t help but think that however else I make sense of my story this observation feels like an integral part of it. Indeed, knowing there are others like me, and encountering such voices along my journey helps to remind me that my own need to be able to tell my story from this vantage point need not feel defeating or overtly dramatic. Not to me anyways. They are, if nothing else, what make me feel alive. It reflects my single greatest desire: to know what’s true. They are reflections of a story that seeks to understand a Life precisely because it demands this sort of wrestling, however incomplete that process remains.
Another such writer is Paul Kingsnorth, someone who’s own lifelong wrestling ultimately led to an unexpected re-enchanting of the world he once saw as suspect. And while there are certain key differences regarding the trajectory of some of our conclusions, I have always felt a deep connection to the particular shape of his journey that is anchored in the idea of necessary narratives. In his most recent book titled Against the Machine, he quotes the famed mythicist Joseph Campbell, saying the following,
“Schism in the soul, schism in the body’s social will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism) or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism). Or even by the most realistic hard headed work to weld together again the disintegrated elements (presentism). Only birth can conquer death. The birth not of the old thing again, but of something new.”
Kingsnorth summarizes this by saying, in Campbell’s view “there is nothing we can do but be crucified and resurrected.” This is what it is to alive.
The most crucial point here being, crucifixion, or the Powers of Death, only makes sense within the language of resurrection. Apart from that there is only Death. Such a sense of loss as a general truism regarding Death only makes sense in light of Life if the lost thing itself is being reborn. Which is why even those who resist religious conviction fight so hard to recast Death in the language of the eternal at seemingly every corner. We see this in such approaches where the “I” becomes absolved into the whole of history. Where the dust that we are made from is spun as the same stuff that makes the stars. We see this in sentiments like “we live on in our kids,” or in constructed conceptions such as “legacy.” In our modern context we see this running rampant through the language of “environmentalism,” and even in more spiritual approaches that evoke the common “energy” that runs through the universe.
And yet for as much as this reveals an essential truth about the schism, it also proves itself to be anchored in an empty and largely incoherent narrative. Apart from our ability to name Death as antithetical to Life nothing else can make logical sense.
Which brings me to my story. Perhaps in wrestling this particular story down it might become possible to reclaim some of that long lost innocence from the grips of Death. Perhaps it might be possible to hand myself a renewed ability to properly name a Life. The risk is there of course, but this simple idea nevertheless remains a necessary starting point for engaging that conversation.
Every story begins somewhere. Rarely does it start at the beginning. The human brain just doesn’t work that way. Rather, true beginnings are generally found at that necessary point of a given crisis. That’s where we find the dramatic tension. Those intersections which suggest and help clarify that something hangs in the balance. Thus why I begin my story with the above reflections.
For me, as I alluded to above, the moment when this intuition comes most alive likely locates me in my late 20’s when everything I once thought to be true was legitimately thrown into question. My optimism. My faith. My hope. My joy. My trust. My identity. My trust in the many constructs that uphold our sense of being (such as our constructed concepts of the self). My place in this world.
I will detail that moment to be sure, much of it bringing me to a stark and vital call to remember, an invitation to see the things I was wrestling with from a different vantage point and put my present vantage point to the test. It was a moment in which I was forced to confront my own tightly guarded definitions of Death and Life, regardless of where it brought me.
I will tell that part of my story eventually.
But for it to truly make sense it needs the context of the years that brought me to that point. To understand what I was in danger of losing in this particular moment of my life requires knowing what had been building up to this point. Just keep in mind that as humans we don’t translate our stories beginning at birth and moving towards death. I get that. In many ways that just underscores everything I’ve been talking about above. What we know are stories about qualitative aspects of reality What draws us into the stories we tell and the stories we read and encounter is the promise that this tension, this binary if you will, leads to something true. To knowledge. To logos.
And so, with the above tension in play, my story begins with this sentence: I wasn’t always a child. At some point I grew up and that child was lost.
But before I grew up, before I became lost, I was born. Or so I’ve been told.
The Stories of my Life 