This is my letter to the world,

That never wrote to me,–

The simple news that Nature told,

With tender majesty. Her message is committed

To hands I cannot see;

For love of her, sweet countrymen,

Judge tenderly of me! — Emily Dickinson.

No, this isn’t a suicide note. I plan on living for a long time. But, unless we unlock the key to reversing aging, I’m going to eventually die, and my words are still going to be out there.

It’s creepy to think about that.

There’s a friend I have — a soldier in Afghanistan — who died in combat. In his early 20s, full of life, jokester. Colorful Facebook page. And after he died, the page was memoralized.

There’s a weird puzzle that won’t resolve when I visit the page, especially on a somber day like Memorial Day — you get the sense that this person is too full of life to be dead. Death is something somber and serious, and sometimes I feel somber and serious when I think about his death. But when I visit his page and see his smiles and antics, I smile, which tricks me into thinking that I’ll maybe bump into him again — till I remember that he’s dead. And then, every time, I can’t reconcile the life in the words left behind with the somber visage of death. It just doesn’t make sense.

Then it dawns on me — People will probably visit this blog, and my Facebook page, and other things I’ve written, long after I’m dead, just as I still visit the Facebook page of my friend. How are they going to make sense of all these words I leave behind?

I know that on a certain level it’s illogical to think about these things. When I die, I’ll be dead. Why should I care?

I suppose I care because I’ve found out that I’m not the only person in the world who is affected (and will be affected) by the same forces that cause the experiences I write about. It’s true, for example, that religion has had a negative impact on my life — but it’s also true that I’m not the only one, and that the forces that negatively influenced me will continue to do so for others. To impact those forces, I have to figure out how to express those experiences effectively, translating those experiences into words.

In other words, there’s the raw experience of living…and then there are the words we use to communicate what that experience is like — the attempts to make it comprehensible to both others and myself. And I know, in spite of my efforts, that after I’m gone people are going to look at the words and think I’m misinterpreting what happened to me and could have made better decisions in what I wrote, said, and did. They may have a point. But at the same time — understand my situation here. No one asked me if I wanted to be born, and no one save me had the things happen to me that happened to me; you’re on the outside looking in. I’m just here, life is happening to me without giving me a reason as to why, and I am left to make some sense of it all to articulate to you.

As Dickinson put it, the world never “wrote to me” to tell me who I am or how I was supposed to present myself — I’m figuring it out as I go along and experience things. And as I do, people see records of it in what I do and say, making my life “a letter to the world.” If it is flawed here or there, please remember — like the rest of nature, I am largely along for the ride, figuring it out as I go.

So…please, any future readers — and present readers, as well — if what I say seems a bit “off” to you, remember that I’m figuring things out as I go, like everyone else. We think of death so often as this somber moment, as this closed book that defines who a person is. But the truth is that each person is part of a larger fabric of billions of experiences placed within an even larger arena of happenings that constantly affect those experiences, and the resulting collision between the context of reality and our experience within it is something that seems to bring us all together.

In many ways, this connection to the fabric of human experience and the larger context surrounding it is why I see myself as writing about things greater than myself, albeit from the bound context of my own humble experience. Each of our experiences are reactions to very real happenings in the world that give life to what happens in our overwhelmingly massive context of the universe.

I suppose this realization informs what I do, as an atheist, with my friend who was killed in Afghanistan. Instead of cordoning him off into a never-land of heaven, I can see him for who he is — a wide eyed, vibrant young man who wanted to do the best he could for his country, who put his life on the line and yet respected authority enough to go forward and scope out a possible (who turned out to be an actual) suicide bomber after ordering his troops to stay behind until it was safe.

I can think about the raw reality of the scene – the look in the devoted suicide bomber’s eyes, the surrounding dust, the tenseness of the watching troops, the carefree smile he showed while he must have felt a rising fear, the ingredients that made heroism out of a friendly, easy-living and yes, even god-fearing patriotic jokester in one small location of the universe in a specific place of spacetime within the larger context of a controversial war.

I can take that moment for what it is — mixed in with all my doubt about the efficacy of war — informing it, giving it a sensitivity in my criticism. Even his faith is something I can strive to understand as a function of his experiences, challenging my own anti-theistic views and even informing them.

And I guess that’s what I really want people to do with all the expression I leave behind — see it as a way to understand experiences and the forces that created them. Hopefully, instead of merely dismissing me as angry at religion, they will consider the often valid reasons why I have sometimes exhibited anger at religion, as well as all the tender moments I have had with close family and friends who have happened to be religious, and they will take the bits and pieces to enrich and inform their own lives and those of others.

I love existence. I love embracing it, treasuring it, feeling it in my heart and mind, to the center of my bones. This world is sometimes ugly, yes, but even the ugly parts defy simplification upon examination; the universe as a whole seems somehow beautiful in its complexity and, by extension, by the ways it intrudes on and molds my experience.

I used to believe, when I was a Christian, that Adam and Eve ate a fruit in a garden and were punished, creating a horrific Original Sin I would be forever bound to. That was my identity — a human born apologizing for the Original Sin and for the sin my natural self committed — eternally grateful to God for His Grace.

The moment I left Christianity, I had to start from scratch, and what I found has been thoroughly inspiring — for example, I learned for the first time that the hands I typed with are, quite literally, the result of exploding stars. That may sound mundane to some, but it blew my mind to think that I was not born apologizing for my existence — I was part of the fabric of existence, deeply and thoroughly.

So, because of that…I’ve realized that when one of us attempts to give voice to what they think or feel, they are attempting to contribute to the constantly evolving and expanding human experience of defining our relationship to the raw there-ness of outside natural forces.

This universal struggle to situate the raw, intruding there-ness of natural forces into the experiences of our lives — and the empathetic, yet selfish, desire to compare notes as we engage in this effort — is what makes us all part of what we’ve come to call the human condition. I am not attempting to take charge of your life; I’m also animated by our experience in this spinning ball of dust, another member of humanity comparing notes. And so it’s in this way that, even if you’re reading my words across the years or viewpoints, I think we’re all in this together.

Thank you for reading.

[Featured image via Ginny under CCL 2.0]