Dealing the Void and Finding Joy

I just found this piece that I wrote some time ago.  I find it accurate to what I experience, though I am now working my way into an understanding of spirituality, as I have explained in previous posts.

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The void and joy

June 14, 2015

I know the void. It is behind everything. I became aware of it when I learned I had a serious cancer that will probably kill me. Here is how the void works: It makes everything pointless. Suddenly questions like Why should I do that? or Why do I care? or Why should I make that plan? or buy that? or work on that project? all take on a different meaning. In my pre-cancer life those things were impinged upon by other cares and needs. The question was answered by considering the impact of a ‘void’ question--whatever it is--against that other thing that I had to get done or wanted to get done in my life. Suddenly with this new reality the projects can seem like whistling in the graveyard. What difference does anything make? If I have a project, say my genealogy, am I just killing time until I die? Is that life? Basically, Who cares?  The void exerts enormous pressure. It impinges on everything. It is present in all decisions, all moments. It is a huge blanket, fog, dullness. The response to it is to sleep. On bad days the void makes itself present, very present. Or perhaps it is that on those days, whatever protection I have against it is thinner. weaker, less able to stand up for itself

It seems to me that for many people the answer to the void is God.  God is as large as the void. God offers the hope of life after. God allows you to avoid the void because you have something as big on your side.

But I am not really able to subscribe to that possibility. Where can I turn?  My answer for now is Joy. I enjoy a lot of things. Photography, rock climbing, eating, and on and on with a list of all the things I am involved with in a day.  The void would have me think ‘How foolish. Who cares? This is not significant.’  The presence of cancer has taught me that I can't accept that. I have to find a grasp on joy. I have to see joy as not some momentary incident (my team wins a baseball game, I see a grand child, I stop at a particularly fine building, I solve a genealogy research issue, I climb a difficult route). Joy or it, close relative engagement has to be permanent.

Where does Joy come from? Right now my only answers are my history and my present. For instance I have a history of rock climbing. When I get better at it the presence of my history of not being good at it feeds my joy. The same for the meal I eat that Mary cooked. But what about time wasters, like digital solitaire? If the void could dictate I would play meaningless solitaire until I die.  With joy solitaire is a connection between events.

There is also joy in the present. That joy has to come from acceptance. Since I have begun these thoughts, I have realized I have a different view of people I meet. I often found it easy to dismiss people--for all kinds of reasons. I won’t detail them. But even total strangers.  It is easy to poke fun.  Now I find that poking fun is ridiculous. Each of them dwells with the

Void. They have to find a way to deal with it.  Dealing with it requires attention to both the present and history. We have to find strength to maintain that attention, that engagement.

I wish I could tell you where that strength is.  I can only say that you have to find it. I found mine when the doctor told me I had cancer, bad cancer, and I realized that I was not afraid. That is my basis. From that I can look at meaninglessness and go forward. It is actually a bit odd, because I have been frightened by other things in my life, like the time I thought I would lose my sight or the various times when I worried that I could lose my job.

I am reminded as I write that when I taught literature, in particular lyric poetry, I told students that for any poem they could diss it or explore it. To diss is the voice of the Void.  It is easy to not realize that if you don't have the sense not just that you will die but that you will die in the foreseeable future.  Without that sense of death the Void is just another abstraction. It is only when it becomes the kind of reality that it has for me that I have found that I have to consider it and find a way to keep it from controlling me, or at least derailing me.  I suppose I am controlled by it.  The Hmong talk about the sickness having you rather than you having a sickness and that seems true to me now, though it did not when I first heard the concept.  In that way, yes, cancer has me. But I am not rendered helpless by that fact.  My friend Joe said when he turned one of the milestone birthdays, perhaps 75, ‘What am I supposed to do? Wait around to die?’ And the answer is no. However, the path forward from the point at which that question enters your life is not a flat paved trail or sidewalk.  It is a rocky mountain trail.  It is hard to negotiate, but if I look up it is also the place where I can see, now, beautiful sights, mountain ranges, glacial lakes.  It is the joy that happens when you explore a poem or a painting and suddenly it pays back with insight.