Existential Vulnerability

There is a natural state, a kind of awareness that everyone experiences. This state, for good reason, is rarely described. I suppose the experience, though very common, is hard to capture with words. I know I feel daunted. The vulnerability that attends existence isn’t felt and experienced the same by everyone.  Words cannot convey fully what happens, or what it is like. In fact, there seems to be a deep ambivalence that attends the experience of existential vulnerability, and makes it hard to grasp.

Regardless, of the natural limitations that make this part of being human so impossible to convey, I’m going to try to penetrate that ambivalence enough to refer to this facet of being alive. I know I cannot do more. For, although I think our shared existential vulnerability unites us, I am aware that what we commonly experience does not easily translate into words. The condition that animates us into existence, and attends to us throughout life, often evades us, precisely because of its power in our lives. There is a natural reticence that comes with a deep realization of how fragilely we are created. There is a state of paradoxical nakedness that accompanies each of us, no matter how well dressed our station in life. The fact we are alive is so precious and so evanescent!

The vulnerability of existence, the knowledge that each of us is here, and that we did nothing to make it so, somehow sheers from us bravado, and reduces each of us into a quivering mass of meat. This experience underlies everything. Whether a banker, professor, miner, or street person with delusional thoughts, each can be reduced to that same steaming heap of dust. There is humility and a implacable justice that attends this leveling off. All are really nothing, and oddly and inexplicably something. This is the raw state we share.

Recently, I heard someone with a heart pacemaker describe waking up in the middle of the night, with irregular heartbeats, and wondering if this is the moment, the way she was going to die. I have reason to suspect that most of those reading these words have had their own moments like this. Everyone knows our time could end at any moment and few of us live like that. I am writing about this, not because I think we should be trying to live out each moment with this awareness. I do.

What motivates my writing today is something quite different, I want to underscore the perpetual fragility of all of our lives. This aspect of what we all share, brings out the compassion in me, and most importantly, arouses awareness in me.  I share the same mysterious origin as others. I am related to them by virtue of the common mystery of our existence.

I find this fact of life compelling. Underneath all of the differences I seem to have with everyone there is this one commonality. We came from the same place. And we all are going back there. No matter who we are, or how well we think we’ve lived and loved, or honored any belief system, the truth seems to be, that we return from where we never really left. All of us, are bounded, perpetually, by the unknown.

Existence is so precarious, uncontrollable, and liberating, that it is a solace to me. It seems that there is a built-in sense of community in our shared sense of vulnerability. I can’t think of anything: ideology, religion, gender identification (or not), money, social prestige, intelligence, or particular insight, which overrides this fragility. Human life is hard because this is a condition of our existence. It is also a commonality, which if we could honestly show it to each other, would bind us. One of the deepest levels of our shared humanity, is a liability, a susceptibility to Life, that has a way of bringing us together, despite the stubbornness of our adherence to being unique individuals. There is a paradoxical indifference here that takes us all in, and that teaches us how to do the same.

All we have to do is roll over in each other’s presence and show our bellies. By becoming as vulnerable as we are, and sharing this experience with others (human and non-human), community is exposed — the invisible connection (thought lost by so many) becomes evident again.

I’ll show you mine, because I know my act of disclosure will enhance the likelihood of you showing me yours. Let’s go through that doorway, as deeply revealing as it is.