A Reflection On Mortality

Or How We Can Find Joy in Being.

The other day I came across a quote from one of my favorite authors, Hunter S. Thompson, that I had not read before. It turns out it was from a letter he had written when he was twenty-two years old to a friend who was seeking life advice. You can read the entire letter here, but I’m including a quote that particularly stood out for me.

“The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.”

Midjourney prompt: making a choice between being a fireman or a business suit accountant, little boy in the middle looking at them both, Sunday newspaper cartoon style

Now to be fair, you very well still might want to be a fireman. Yet it’s this idea that we are meant to focus our life on goals and then define ourselves by these achievements is what sets us up for disappointment. Instead of becoming a part of the flow, we are aiming our bow at a target we cannot see. I think to my own life and realize that more often than not my best experiences and opportunities have evolved from letting go of goals and having faith in the process. This process is just being present and working daily on building a stronger self-foundation. When I moved to LA at twenty-three I had huge dreams of becoming the next Robert Rodriguez. He was the model I was building my goals and aspirations on, aiming to be an action-filmmaker auteur that then transitioned into the big budget studio movies. It was a nice goal to have, but one that ultimately didn’t play out as I had hoped. His journey is his; mine is mine.

We are always modeling and re-modeling our narratives as we continue to shift our perspectives due to the reactions to our experiences. This is the real crux as to what Thompson is talking about as our expectations are constantly being challenged with every twist and turn of fate. There is an entire industry built around this as “gurus” prey on the “lost” while offering them a plan to get them back on track. There are charlatans in every sector looking to profit off insecurity while further feeding the fear that we aren’t good enough if we aren’t hitting certain metrics. It’s this “grind” culture that is killing us. Sadly that death we are being aimed toward is one which will not give us satisfaction in either the moment or in retrospective.

Midjourney prompt: working eight jobs at once: delivering pizza, talking on the phone, working on a laptop, reading a book etc, done in a cartoon style illustration

I was on a podcast the other night talking about my new ULTIMATE HAWKEYE that came out last week. In the conversation we were talking about success and wealth with regards to monetary metrics. Now don’t get me wrong, having a boatload of money isn’t a bad thing. The point I brought up that is that it’s most important to have peace in our life. Unlike Thompson, I was not so focused on the meaning in my life at twenty-something, but instead the goals I was aiming to achieve. I was often brought opportunities in the comic book space, yet my own hubris had me turning them down and pushing ahead on this vision I was so attached to. It was my stubborn nature that kept me going, never giving up on that initial dream. But it also was that initial dream that got me out of my comfort zone, pushing me into new directions while opening doors giving me the choice to walk through.

I often write about choices in these musings since it’s what we face every day: from the smallest decision to the largest resolution it’s what gives our journey shape. We don’t know how long we have on this planet, so every day we wake up with our health is a better day than the last as the Reaper Time gets one step closer. It’s this reflection that can be most challenging, as we are distracted by our disappointments in not having achieved those goals we had put on our vision boards. Instead of working from within to out, we are taught to work from without to within. This forces a much more amorphous metric to measure happiness as we can only relate to the bulge in our pockets or the achievement met by the goal set. But once we hit that mark, we have to reset in order to keep that upward trajectory. It will always set us up for disappointment which in turn will destroy our peace.

Midjourney prompt: a temple made of all the bones done in a 1920s cartoon style

Peace does not have to be such a challenging endeavor. There always will be conflicts that hit us from left, right, and center, but to be the reed in the storm has to be the goal. I know I’m not there yet. It’s years of learning to be unlearned as we chip away at our reactionary instincts that cause us to engage situations in ways that aren’t always the most productive. Yesterday we got stuck at the top of our street as a construction worker stood there talking on the phone his hand up, holding us in place. We were already running late to a vet appointment and instead of taking a deep breath and knowing that it will flow as it does, I stuck my head out the car window and yelled about how we were behind schedule and asked what’s going on. He then told us they were repaving the road and if we had turned right the car would have gotten stuck in fresh asphalt. Good to know, and luckily we didn’t barge ahead and turn right as that would have really messed up the day.

On my trip to NY this weekend, I watched the movie 28 Years Later. I really enjoyed it more than I thought I would, but I shouldn’t have been surprised as I’m a big fan of the director Danny Boyle’s work as well as the writer Alex Garland. 28 Years Later (the third in the series) was a reflection on both life and death in light of the zombie outbreak that had been plaguing the island for the past twenty-eight years. In the film there is a doctor (played by Ralph Fiennes) who has built a massive temple made up of the skulls and bones from all those who died. As morbid as it is, the sentiment is quite beautiful. He has a short monologue discussing the life that so briefly existed within each skull that powered a body constructed of the bones which now were all so mixed together that their purpose was as equal as the others. The young boy then takes his recently deceased mother’s skull that the doctor had just cleaned and carries it to the highest point of the totem, placing it to face the East as the sun rises.

It is the memories and experiences that we carry and share that give life, not the skulls and bones we leave behind. To live our lives as we’d like to be remembered is more powerful than any bag of cash we might hoard or any statue we might build to ourselves. That said, I’ll leave you with Percy Byshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” that beautifully sums up this sentiment:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.