gyal's blog

Following a long and rather intellectually frustrating debate about the meaning of life or is there any with a bunch of friends over a dinning table, I recalled what the Mexican painter, Frida Kahlo versed before her death ‘I hope the exit is joyful. And I hope never to return.’ Self-evidently, this is a Nihilistic vision of life where there is not only the phantoms of meaninglessness rein our lives but thereby haunt our existence by a specter of fear and anxiety.

Frida’s life wasn’t a beautiful journey, but there is a value in her protest against human nature and the restless human condition. A struggle against the realities of her existence with immense anguish and audacity, not in search of any meaning but a pure exhibition of herself and the realities as she perceived. I intent not to idealize her nor do I want to tell her story. But as I contemplate, given that existence has no meaning in itself I suspect that it does not entail a ‘let-it-go’ precept for life. Life as transitional state of affair between a womb and a tomb, in its transient moment we are privileged with some freedom to choose. The choices we make by listening to our reason or passion is what we become. What if Frida did not choose to paint after the accident that crippled her? What if I did not choose to leave home? We are the choices we make. No matter how ignorant and in what an oblivious climate of consciousness do we choose those paths. Is this what Kierkegaard called ‘a leap of faith’ that our existence is subjected to? Or ‘Karma’ as might Hindus and Buddhists call it; a beginning-less chain of causality.
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