WHY AM I HERE?
A few thoughts from today's walk with weighted vest in the North Jutland winter sun.
When I look back on the last twenty-five years, I must admit that much of what I then called will was in reality flight. I told myself I was in motion, that I was taking responsibility, that I was building something, but often it was merely a way of avoiding the stillness - that stillness where the real questions begin to make demands. I wasn't running from life, but I was running from the reckoning with what my life was pointing toward, and only much later has it dawned on me how easily one can mistake momentum for meaning.
This recognition has not come by itself, and it has not arisen in isolation. For a number of years, during large parts of the year, I have had weekly conversations with or listened to men who are considerably older than me, and who no longer have anything to prove. Men whose bodies have given up before their judgment, and who therefore speak without illusions about what became and what did not. When you listen week after week to people who stand closer to life's ending than to its beginning, the nice explanations disappear quickly. What emerges is not success stories, but consequences - especially those tied to what one failed to do, or what one postponed because something else seemed more important in the moment.
These conversations have had the uncomfortable effect of removing my ability to lie to myself. For when the same patterns repeat in stories from men who have lived an entire life, it becomes difficult to maintain the notion that one is oneself the exception. They rarely speak of work, titles or possessions. They speak of children they lost contact with, relationships that were not tended, and of an inner orientation that was postponed until time ran out. To hear it again and again is like having the future read aloud, with no possibility of interrupting the reading.
The days between Christmas and New Year have amplified this recognition. When the tempo slows, and the year can no longer be edited, it becomes clear that there are questions which cannot be outsourced to a later time. The question is not whether life was busy, but whether it was directed. Not whether one got far, but whether one moved in a direction one can with good conscience hand over to those who come after. What follows here is therefore not intended as comfort, but as a necessary reckoning with the notion that there will always come a better moment to take it seriously.
For there comes a point in every person's life when one question slowly emerges from the stillness and places itself before you with a calm that is difficult to shake off. It rarely happens in moments of triumph, success or busyness, but rather when the world dampens itself, when the day's noise has settled, and the mind can no longer hide behind tasks.
The question is simple, but inexorable -
Why am I here? And one discovers, often too late, that if one does not choose to face it oneself, it will sooner or later return and demand its answer.
For some of us, only on our deathbed - "What happened? I thought it lasted forever? And what did it all mean, really?"
For we are strange creatures. Conscious beings on a small globe orbiting a mediocre star in a universe so vast and silent it does not seem to notice our existence. In that context, human life can easily feel fragile and temporary, like a track in snow already beginning to melt.
Yet we spend the first half of our lives gathering, building and chasing, as if permanence could be secured through accumulation. We strive for positions, possessions, recognition and results, and we fool ourselves that if only we gather enough, achieve enough and understand enough, meaning will finally reveal itself as a reward for our effort.
But almost without warning, something begins to change. This is where I myself stand, and have stood these last handful of years.
Life's second half arrives not with fanfare, but as a quiet shift in perspective. What we once grasped for begins slowly to slip from our hands. Parents disappear first, then siblings and friends, and one discovers that the world continues even when the voices that once carried one through existence have fallen silent. The body, which previously obeyed without protest, begins to set its own limits, and the mind loses some of its sharpness but perhaps gains a certain mildness in return. Strength and speed are gradually replaced by reflection and slower steps.
Here it begins for many to become so uncomfortable that they turn away and refuse to see the inevitable waterfall we all must go over.
Layer by layer, what one has spent decades gathering is peeled away. It dawns on you that most of what once felt indispensable was in reality temporary. Perishable. In not many years, your name will cease to be mentioned. The house you called home will be filled with others' lives. The car that once symbolized freedom or success will end as metal scraps. The possessions you guarded will be scattered, forgotten or discarded. Even the achievements you were most proud of will slowly lose their shine and disappear from collective memory.
Everything that was gets run over by time's great inexorable wheel and turned to dust.
Religion has through the ages tried to give an answer to this experience. Sometimes it has done so with a beauty that lifts the soul, other times with a clumsiness that reveals humanity's fumbling in the darkness. We tell stories of the great and the eternal because the silence otherwise becomes too heavy to bear alone. Perhaps these stories are not perfect explanations, but they testify to a recognition that the human being is not made to live without horizon.
That we have strayed into an unreality without horizon - without connection to creation, origin, meaning and purpose - is incidentally the primary existential illness of our time. But that is another post.
But in the midst of all this, there is one thing that proves to have a different character than everything else.
The children.
Not merely as biological extension, but as living carriers of direction. The children one raises oneself, and the children they in turn bring into the world, become the link between what has passed and what is coming. Even when one's name is long forgotten, one's influence lives on in the way they love, in the wounds they carry, and in the care or neglect they pass to the next generation.
It then becomes clear that the human being does not live on through status, wealth or achievements, but through the movement it sets in motion. One does not survive as memory, but as direction. Children are the only work in this life whose significance grows with time, the only investment that truly yields returns, because it shapes people who in turn shape the world. Everything else - however impressive it may seem in the moment - proves to be perishable, like polishing metal on a ship already headed for the deep.
To raise them with care, truth and love, freedom, justice and health is therefore not merely a private task, but work with an eternity perspective. If done well, one's life reaches further than one's own lifetime. If neglected, even the greatest accomplishments lose their weight.
In this lies a simple but serious insight, which both fairy tale and reality repeat -
That what we pass on in living people weighs heavier than everything we try to leave behind in things.
The whole is carried by Love.
❤️🔥🪽
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Therefore ask yourself - if the question in this post is too heavy - what does it say about a society if it does not place consciousness, health, freedom, security, justice, lust for life and life force as the highest priority for its children and young people.
And secondarily - what does it say about a society if it does not cultivate, support and nourish the idea and possibility of having them - and being with them - for adults.
Perhaps these questions are just as difficult - because the answers to them so easily become dark.
