What is your existential challenge?

Why am I at peace? Why do I feel content?

According to my dear friend Gretta, it is because I have done the work involved toward reaching a place of self-love. I never thought that my happiness was contingent upon the work or effort I put into achieving my well-being. Rather I thought that happiness was a matter of chance or luck. When everything seems to go your way, that’s when you’re happy, so I thought. Now I am beginning to understand what Gretta means by work.

When I put in the necessary work involved in self-love, I find my source of happiness being continually replenished. Self-love is what we do to love and care for ourselves on a daily basis. For example, I show love to myself by eating healthy, by helping recovering addicts, by exercising, by treating others with kindness, and by writing. Writing is my primary means of practicing self-love. The gift to communicate to myself on a deep level is a privilege. Each day I do the work involved to maintain this friendship with myself.

Writing in a journal involves the work of staying aware of my changing self: the flux of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and attitudes. By continually evaluating myself, I avoid the dream of my own flawless perfection. As I come closer and closer to myself, however, the self increasingly disappears.

Where am I when I am immersed in my work?

Nowhere but the sea itself.

I consider my real work, the work of the novel I am writing. I am committed to this task I have undertaken—not for fame, not even to publish. In my novel, I attempt to give an honest history of my family during my adolescence. Here my sense of self expands to include my family; I think about the past events from the point of view of my father, mother, and various others. Recounting my family history from multiple perspectives is an existential challenge. What will it take to finish this novel? It seems I’ve only scratched the surface of this glacial undertaking. I recall Gretta’s words, “life is work”.

Life is work in its myriad forms.

We disappear into our work.

At Hamilton College, I was touched by the vision of becoming a writer. At the time, I didn’t exactly know what a writer was—there were many models of writers and my professors were some of them. But I did not want to be like them. Doran Larsen, in particular, was a resentful and bitter writer. More than once, I glimpsed that man’s private agony. As I grew out of the phase of the infantile wish to become a writer, and grew into myself, especially after coming into recovery, I discovered that the process of writing is what most interested me.

I began to see my individual pieces of writing as less important than the journey I was taking toward developing my skills as a writer. With the confluence of my addiction and recovery, that journey was a spiritual one. Therefore, writing, for me, has primarily been a spiritual task, and secondarily, an aesthetic craft.

At the core, I am writing to myself. That is, my unconscious or subconscious self is writing to my conscious self. Through this process I expand my consciousness and evolve as an individual. This activity that I am engaged in, at its base, is an existential challenge. Perhaps if writing came easy to me then I wouldn’t engage in it. You know you are engaging in work when you are continually out of your comfort-zone. Work is not easy-going. Work, at the start and well into the middle, is work.

Eventually one habituates oneself to the practice; the work becomes second-nature and does not put a strain on the individual anymore. Take, for example, the journal that I write in nearly three times daily. I have successfully habituated myself to the task of journal-writing. I enjoy writing in a journal; it is a leisurely, easy-going activity for me. This contrasts with the work I put in every day to write my novel.

Here I’m tempted to say that our ultimate aim in life is to meet our existential challenge. But if I said this in the collective “we” then I would be universalizing my experience, and assuming that everyone holds the same ideals as me. Therefore, I will only speak for myself here and hope that by doing so, it doesn’t make any less of a difference.

First, I need to look deep within myself to discover what it is that I feel I lack as a human being. What I find is that I have a creative need to articulate myself. Can the lack be defined? The closest I come to identifying the void: I feel I am essentially lacking in my capacity for true self-expression. But this answer falls short of the real answer, the answer that I cannot articulate yet. Any attempt to pin down the existential lack seems to elude what I’m really trying to do when I write. Thus, the lack is still unconscious. Nevertheless, I choose my existential challenge on the basis of this lack, this dearth that I feel but cannot define. In a letter to his sons Henry and William, Henry James Sr. writes,

Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged. The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and the obscene bird of night chatters.

This paragraph has always been particularly meaningful to me because it illustrates how we grow and develop ourselves out of an essential lack, or scarcity, that we perceive.

In the “Note to the Reader” to his Essays, Montaigne states that his aim is to reveal himself honestly to his friends and family. While this is true for me, I would like to go one step further and reveal myself honestly to myself. To conquer my inner lack I must meet my existential challenge and articulate my deep self.

This, of course, is only my experience of life. That is why, as much as I’d like to apply it to all of humanity, the existential challenge is really only something that applies to me as a human being. Perhaps others can find a value in my definition. But ultimately they need to formulate their own language to suit each of their particular destinies.

Chris Al-Aswad

4/18/2006

Return to the Essay Page

Print Article