๐๏ธโ๐จ๏ธ Momento Mori and Afrikaburn - the Profound Notion of How Impermanence Brings Meaning
Last Updated: 3ย months, 3ย weeks ago
Impermanence - My Experience of Afrikaburn
Afrikaburn was a profound experience for me.Perhaps the most impactful realisation I experienced there was seeing gigantic artworks I had climbed and played in burned to ash, and incredible theme camps packed up, leaving only bare ground, as if nothing had been there.
I was new and didn't understand how the event worked. I remember I almost said no to climbing a structure of pillars with a great view of everyone passing below, thinking it'd be there the next day. The next day it was burned. So too was a wooden house that had been covered in graffiti messages the visitors were invited to participate in creating. I remember someone's scrapbook hanging by a string from one of the beams, and wondered what was inside of it.
Now I'll never know, but at least I experienced those artworks, and have something of them in my memory. I learned from this experience in the days that followed to commit other art installations and my moments in them to memory.
To me this really instilled in me the transient nature of, well, everything. (Except, perhaps, the laws of physics in the universe).
Nothing will last forever and everything is subject to loss. We only get one shot, and once something is gone, it's utterly gone, but we still have our memories, our experiences, and our community. That was the message of Afrikaburn. What we create is inside of us, more than it is out there, and that carries within the minds and memories, culture and stories of people even when what is external is lost.
I have a poster of on my wall of an upcoming burn event that never came up due to the pandemic - an ironically meta case of the message being in the medium.
The idea I carried with me is that nothing is permanent. but what we have now in this glorious, short existence should be celebrated.
My Afrikaburn poster where it lives, in my reading corner
The Good Place, Tuck Everlasting and the Preference of Mortality
Afrikaburn was a profound experience for me.It reminds me of a movie I didn't understand as a child: Tuck Everlasting.
(Note: Spoilers upcoming!)
I still think if that movie, set in the turn of the 20th century. In it, a teenage girl, Winnie Foster, grows tired of having her every move dictated by her wealthy family, and she runs away into the nearby forest. She meets and gradually falls in love with a boy, Jesse, from an immortal family, the Tucks. (In this story, immortal means invulnerable - that you cannot die at all, not simply that you cannot die of natural causes.)
The family are hounded by a man who has long pursued them in secret, chasing after the secret of immortality. He threatens to kill Winnie as a means to force the family to reveal the secret, and after defeating him, the family have to flee.
Before they disappear, Jesse urges Winnie to go to the spring and drink the water that made the family immortal and to become immortal herself, and to meet Jesse back at the same spot a hundred years later.
At the end of the movie, Jesse, now in present day, arrives on a motorcycle, ready to meet Winnie at their chosen spot. Instead, he sees her beautifully decorated grave, with the spring dried up.
The interpretation was that Winnie saw more value in living her full, natural life through all stages to the end than in clinging to one stage of it, her youth. She chose not to be "stuck as she was", a message Jesse's father, Tuck, had cautioned her she would be if she drank from the spring.
As a teenager, this movie frustrated me, as it seemed Winnie was denying herself a perfect immortal life and love, with all the time in the world to experience it doing all the things she wanted to do long after her family were gone.
But now I think I get it. The narrator in the story implies that her life changed when she went back home. That from that point onward, she knew she'd be taking her life into her own hands and making her own choices to live a full life, her life. She understood now the kind of life she wanted to live, and it was about moving forward, not holding on to what had been.
Another show I love, the Good Place (spoilers ahead) draws on this same idea of a final death, a final end to life, being what makes life meaningful.
When the protagonists, seeking "the good place" (heaven) in their afterlife, finally arrive, they are initially underwhelmed by how bored the residents seem. It turns out that living in perpetual bliss has become meaningless and monotonous to them and they are numb, almost depressed by it, with no apparent end in site.
The solution turns out to be to create an exit portal one can pass through when one finally decides they are done with the afterlife. Then, the traveller can finally cease to be or "move on" becoming merely essence channelled back into the universe.
This reignites everyone's passion for experiencing life to the full - we see people doing everything they had always wanted to do on their bucket list and receiving much-needed closure, before finally moving on to their final end.
The conclusion was that nobody truly wanted to live forever. All they really wanted was more time to do what was important.
The Quest(ion) to find a Meaningful Life
My friend, ฯ, once asked me how I'd feel if I had just one week, or perhaps one month to live - whether I'd be happy with the current trajectory of my life and the decisions I was making to live by, or would want things to be different.
What would it take for me to be satisfied that this was life, I had lived it, and I had done all I could to live the best life?
I suppose that is why I ultimately started this blog.
This question has been the theme of my meditations the past few years ever since we had this conversation, as what I have been trying to work out. What brings meaning to me? What would I consider to have been a good and satisfying life?
Does the concept of "wasting time" fit into it, or does redeeming the end part make everything else worthwhile? How much of our time needs to be spent doing something "worthwhile"? What IS "worthwhile"? And how do we live a worthwhile life when people are forced into slavery under capitalism, where time is not our own and we lack agency in so many of the greater decisions surrounding our lives depending on who is in power at a given time and which human rights are acknowledged?
And how do I think about all of this without getting depressed, anxious or overwhelmed with analysis paralysis from impossible perfectionism, when tempted to view meaning as trying to live a life of maximum beneficial achievement, or leaving the maximum positive impact apon the world?
Nihilism, Stoicism and Buddhism
While this has lately been causing me a lot of existential anxiety, I am starting to think this may be more of a feelings issue than a rationality-based one.
It's easy to feel overwhelmed and descend into nihilism, seeing the world as a cold place when there is, I believe, no heaven.
I've shared this in a previous article, but I'm going to share what John Green said about Nihilism again because it's just that awesome (and relevant).
I don't want nihilism to define my life, future and legacy.
One thing I know though, I sure don't like to be cold, so let's make it a warm life.
In reality, the universe isn't cold, except physically. It just IS. It is us who place meaning and significance on this, similarly to what as casual geographic points out about at the introduction to this video when describing the how, despite the positive human emotions we ascribe to creatures, "animals aren't good or evil, they're just them".
Taking this excuse to share Casual Geographic's wholesome video here:
Philosophy Tube does a great explanation of Stoic Philosophy here:
And this is why for me Buddhism is so closely linked with Stoicism. Serenity and acceptance are at the core of this philosophy, not the pursuit of happiness.
The serenity prayer is a great example of this, and sums up Buddhism really well.
Accepting what is guaranteed (death) as a baseline and what isn't as a bonus?
Maybe just accepting that with only death being certain, a comforting guarantee, every extra day is a gift, to be spent the best way we can, and that's it. Maybe our timeline of life is like us running through a level of a 2D platformer game from left to right, but every bonus and hidden treasure is a gift, every bonus round, every artwork, before we finally make it go the end and say "that was a really great game. GG"
But what do I do with this? How do I live my life... in practicality? And what do I have to give to the world?
How do I live my life in practicality with all of these questions though? What do I do with my time on earth? What is my "right path"? IS there one? Is there ANY right path? Is this what they mean by "life is what you make of it?"
I've had a goal of writing a book about my cult experiences, and I still want to do this, heavy as the task seems. But something else struck me as I was thinking during a pause in writing this article. I'm so used to feeling like I have to give, to help others, to think of others and what I can do for them, and seeing this as defining my worth, in, essentially, a capitalistic way.
It was part of my parentification and my upbringing in being raised as female as the oldest child in a conservative evangelical (cult) environment.
But maybe I don't have to give in order to have worth.
I do WANT to give. But more than that, maybe I haven't experienced enough of the world to know what my legacy will be.
Unlearning Parentification and the Pressure to Give Without Taking Up Space
I took a break after writing this and something hit me while I was watching the documentary Happy Shiny People, the exposรฉ about the Duggars and the IBLP cult they raised their children in. In the series, one of the interviewees raised in the Quiverfull movement states that families under that organisation become their own cults, with fathers taught by the organisation to become their own cult leaders.
My thoughts while watching this were how the victims of all of this didn't know and couldn't know that there was a whole better world out there which would treat them better, respect them, uphold their rights and that they didn't have to be parentified, forced into physical labour or to sign contracts, or abused in multiple ways.
Maybe this holds true for me - that I haven't experienced everything the world has to offer for me.
Maybe it's ok to just learn, to explore learning all the things the cult kept away from me, just as when I see other victims I wish and hope that they will learn what the world really has to offer them, and how much better life can be, though they can't imagine that yet because they haven't seen it.
Maybe there's something more out there for me that I haven't even experienced yet, and exploration and discovery are just... ok for now.
I don't have to think about what I can do for others, or what I can be, because maybe that's just me trying to prove my worth, to justify my existence, an externalisation of the cult.
The Pressure to "Make Up" For Lost Childhood - "Catching Up" or Being a "Cautionary Tale"
At this point I am reminded of a video where Dr K aka Healthygamergg interviews a cult survivor.
Just like this person Dr K interviewed who wanted to achieve so much to make up for the time stolen, I relate to that pressure. Back in my evangelical days, I truly believed in eternal life after death, and that this present life and its sufferings (and joys) were to be dismissed as "worthless", that our time on earth was to be counted as "less than nothing" up until our death (Philippians 3:8, Romans 8:18), a "cheap" price to pay and something necessary to be sacrificed single-mindedly and without hesitation in order to achieve salvation (Matthew 16:25) and for the "cause" of "saving the lost".
I think this absolute thinking as well as the performative parenting with which my parents raised us relates to my perfectionism. Maybe what I thought I had addressed is still there - my desperate desire to make up for lost time stolen by the cult, compounding on that performative perfectionism so that I feel that I have to do something superhuman to make my life "worth" it - like nothing I ever do will be worth it otherwise.
And there's two things I need to remind myself. Firstly, even if I do write a book and share my experiences for the sake of others, that won't make my experiences somehow "worth it" - as if sharing my story means that it was somehow "more ok" that it happened, and that time wasn't wasted and trauma didn't accumulate. And secondly, what I can share with others is not the sum total of my life and my life's worth.
Everything I do, experience, live and feel - because it's about expressing and experiencing me not just about what I can do for others - is intrisically worth it!
You're worth more than what you can give to other people
There is a line that occurs in penultimate episode of She-ra and the Princesses of Power, which I find profoundly meaningful.
Adora's own life is one which I feel I can really relate to in a lot of ways. She is herself raised in a cult environment, taught a lie about the "cause" she is fighting for, and believing during her training that she will be "liberating" people from tyrannical rule instead of fighting to enslave them.
The indoctrination and supremacist "liberation" belief Adora was raised with and ultimately escaped is eerily similar to my own upbringing into the Evangelical World-Domination agenda and being instructed to "grow into" (in reality infiltrate) the "Seven Spheres of Influence" in order to achieve "Christian Influence" and "God's Will" in order to "Save the Lost" - but which I now understand was actually Christian Nationalism bent on imposing a global theocracy, in a similar way to what is currently being attempted by the Republican party in the USA.
She-ra at the beginning of the series makes a discovery of this true agenda of imposing dominion, and simultaneously realises that she posseses the powers of She-ra, and the ability to change the trajectory of this war and protect others from falling victim to the danger she now knows better than anyone, inside and out.
The pressure to be a hero and to protect others at the expense of herself drives her throughout the series, and yet unaddressed it becomes all-consuming, and almost leads to her own ultimate destruction. But in what could have been her final moments, she endounters the spirit of Mara, the previous She-ra, who died in her own She-ra duty of protecting the earth.
Mara tells Adora not to sacrifice herself, as Mara had done, and that Mara's death had been to prevent further sacrifice. She-ra believes that all she has to give is her sacrifice, but Mara corrects her.
"You're worth more than what you can give to other people. You deserve love, too."
Perhaps I really needed to be reminded of this. Perhaps need to watch She-ra again. That show was awesome in how it speaks of trauma, friendship and chosen family, an understanding and acceptance of people's differences, post-abuse recovery, finding (or accepting?) purpose, and how life does not always have the clear-cut and easy answers we want, but that, in the words of Entrapta, another epic character, "imperfection is beautiful"!
And another realisation I have started to have is that just maybe, I should try getting out of the digital world a bit more often. The pandemic has really gotten me living in my head too much, thinking about doing things instead of actually doing them, and it's dawned on me that overthinking can itself be a major part of the problem. Instead of measuring twice to cut once, it's more like measuring 50 times in order to go outside. This type of recursive over-analysis is not healthy for anyone, I am sure.
But I do think that, whatever I do, it is ok to start a little at a time.
And that is why I started this blog.
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