When you drive down Clarence Drive, you are treated with magical views of Fynbos plants and mountains that stretch to the edge of the ocean. Rather than the quintessential or stereotypical drive through a Scandinavian-type forest, we drive here through Fynbos and sea spray whilst the mountains knock on your windshield.
But this drive always makes me think. It makes me feel so small and insignificant. In short, it makes me philosophical. I grew up driving this road, partly because my dad owns a small house in the neighboring town. So, this might actually be the roots of my philosophical thinking!
In any case, with the changing world, and my own changing life, this drive today was one of those philosophical ones in which I just thought about it all. The bigger picture stuff. So, if these kinds of discussions tickle your fancy, please read on!
Staying in my comfort zone, I have never really had to make life-altering decisions. Now, I am on the cusp of making decisions that can change the course of my life. I went away with my dad to this home along the coast and we talked a bit about life and all of these decisions one needs to make. In driving home, I thought about how insignificant our worries are.
Yet, these are my worries. They are my own. I cannot transfer them, I cannot make someone else worry for me, neither can someone else tell me that I should not worry about these things. They are my own. They are so personal, yet universal in some sense. We are humans and we do worry. And now, I am on the cusp of making life-altering decisions; my own worries are again knocking on the door.
It sounds worse than it is. But that is because it is my worries and not yours. Not the priest's, not the government official's, nor my dad's. My worries and problems can affect them, but at the end of the day, they still remain my own. And this fact about my worries helps structure my world. My world is inextricably linked to my worries.
The drive down the road with mountains on my right and ocean on my left always calms me. It grounds me in a strange way wholly different from actually grounding oneself by standing in nature with the grass hugging your feet. No, this type of grounding is a humbling one, one that people normally say when they feel their insignificant smallness in the face of a massive mountain. One might state this as a religious or spiritual feeling. Irrespective of one's spiritual or religious affiliations or lack thereof, everyone surely from time to time feels this feeling of a greater or bigger picture. One is an insignificant spec of dust against these massive mountains. How can my worries be of any concern even for myself when something as magnificent as a mountain lay beside me like a sleeping giant?
Grabbing my own ideas floating away from myself, I pull them back to ground them again. Yes, the bigger picture and religious/spiritual feelings, and so on, but I ground myself back in the concrete, the worries I do have. Yes, my worries are insignificant contrasted against the big-ness of the mountains, but because they are mine I cannot escape them by drowning myself in insignificance. I need to face them head-on.
The mountain feels like a sleeping giant. I want to jump over her valleys and drown myself in the insignificance and at the same time importance of it all. Such a beautiful contradiction. Yet, I sit in the car and feel my own worries bite at my ankles trying to debilitate me. But again at the same time, it does not. It is a cosmic battle inside of me with the one never really beating the other one. It is surely a strange battle, but are they all not?
For now, I bask in the moment in which I do not have to make these decisions. I know I cannot extend them any longer, I need to make them. I need to get out of my comfort zone and face my worries head-on. But sometimes it is not worth the worries themselves to worry about them. Most things one worries about never happens. And that mountain of a fact should make one rest more easily.
But it never really does.
Some humans really do just like to worry about things because not worrying at all in some strange way symbolizes a lack of caring.
So, maybe this is the underlying Angst Heidegger writes about we feel when we care about our lives?
All of the photographs and videos were taken by my iPhone. The musings and writings (and essential worries) are my own, albeit inspired by these worries.
I hope you are well, and not too debilitated by your worries. Stay safe!