Questions keep arising, even without answers

I’m sitting on the couch on the porch at about 1:30 a.m. watching the neighborhood felines… I’m sitting on the couch on the porch at about 1:30 a.m. watching the neighborhood felines project my personal nightmare on a quiet city night and worrying. I’m not worrying about the cats. They’re just roaming free over the silent homes as though we’ve all died out and they’re living atop our ruins. They’re not doing anything that would trouble a well-balanced mind, and I’m not even that troubled by what I can’t help but feel is the result of a bestial coup.

For once I’m worrying about things that don’t rely on revelation. In fact, it’s exactly the absence of a revelation of any sort that concerns me.

Things aren’t exactly coalescing. I’d hoped by now to have resolved a few existential dilemmas, have a solid grasp on important issues or at least some idea of what I want to do with the rest of my life. I’ve been whining to my friends about hypocrisy, going on iconoclastic rants and pointing out all of America’s cultural sins since middle school. I’ve been writing about these things throughout college. I’m still no closer to a codified resolution.

I’ve been waiting for insight, motivation or the ever-elusive revelation for a while now, and in its absence my life has been moving on without all those pieces that, at 13, I thought were so important to have in place. It’s not that the last eight years have been entirely without value. I’ve built up a pretty solid list of “not this” or “not that” type rules, but that’s just not enough anymore.

There must be a middle path, a way to take control of life without cryogenically freezing free thought and honesty until the midlife-crisis-thaw and almost inevitable subsequent euthanasia. There must be a way to do that without treating questions of faith and my future like short answer questions on an exam that I haven’t studied for.

There must be a way, but I can’t quite find it. I get the day-to-day things working well and all of a sudden I feel detached from those things I believe are important: I start studying for the LSAT, then I think about a life where briefs are all I get paid to write, and I’m not sure what to do. I don’t have a clear set of priorities because I haven’t figured out all the elements on the list – I can’t rank them if I don’t know what they’re worth.

I really thought that sometime during college I’d come across a class or book that would clear things up for me, maybe by handing me a prototype that I could live by while I worked out the kinks.

I can argue for or against any position. I did learn that in college, but I don’t know what I really believe is the right answer to questions of abortion or gun control, much less how to relate to God or even what to do after I graduate.

I feel like abortion is murder and I believe women should be able to commit it. I feel that people ought to be as free as possible and that there are way too many guns on the street. I feel that God’s a myth and I wish I could believe in that myth. I feel like if I go work in the wrong place I’ll be trapped as that person forever and that “life’s not a paragraph.”

I feel all of these things but I don’t really know. I haven’t worked them out, but as an adult I have an obligation to make informed decisions about all of the issues that impact my life and the life of other citizens in this country. I can’t do it because I really don’t have a stance that I’m sure of. Everything is still a question, and I need some short-term solution to the problem of still having only questions.

I’m not addressing the type of understanding or agreement or code of behavior that would allow someone to survive the America I so frequently critique, soul intact. The question is, how should we live in between recognizing we need an answer and finding one?

It’s been an hour made longer by looking over my shoulder waiting for those beasts to go all Planet of the Apes – or, you know, cats – on me. I don’t expect to find any answers on this couch in the cold cursing at shadows, but I think it’s important to figure out some sort of regularly applied, carefully crafted, though certainly not changeless, code before graduation.

Without one we’re just sort of adrift in the world, children with paychecks. The nation’s prolonged childhood quite a bit. We could all use the extra time to figure things out, but after a point childhood becomes a corrosive luxury that no society can afford.

Burn the puppets with Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.