The Eternal Okay
On fundamental okayness.
The sentiment “everything is going to be okay” is a hidden profundity on the prospect of eternity. This “okayness”-quality to existence might carry with it a certain wishy-washy notion that most people might find almost deterring.
Especially when they consider all the problems, both personal and societal, all the political strife, the wars, the famine, the scarcity, exploitation, dishonesty, the atrocities we do to one another, and so on. It seems as if we’re saying that against all this, things are still going to come out on top, which seems to mock all the issues at hand and to be dreaming of the highest caliber.
Of course, we also say things are going to be okay to lift someone’s spirits. It isn’t always the case that it carries some deeper truth; We just want to cheer up our buddies who are feeling sad. It makes sense, therefore, that I would be just grasping at straws here and invoking something that isn’t even there.
Back when I took an interest in certain philosophies and traditions of the world many years ago, however, I noticed a particular pattern embedded in most of them. The pattern was this: life cannot be an ultimate tragedy in the end. It seems to be because, as we know, we all fall apart and decay out of existence.
In many illustrations of Shiva, the Destroyer, one of the Hindu gods, one of his hands is showing a specific sign, which means basically not to worry, because it’s all one big show in the end. Because the end of a cycle implies always a new cycle, and so everything is eternal.
Taking as an example the simple illustration of a tree that produces leaves every year, the leaves die, fall, and disappear, only to reappear cyclically. We might notice that the leaves have differences in their patterns, coloring, and lines. We might even start taking sides the more we get to know them. What we actually are is not so much the individual leaves as we are the tree underlying them. The tree of the universe, one might call it.
This is how I see the concept of reincarnation in modern times. It’s simply the reappearance of patterns in nature. One doesn’t need any supernatural language to explain that the leaf will appear again, albeit in a slightly original form. We could apply this same thinking to human beings. As the law of conservation of energy tells us, we will simply transform and reappear in some place.
Therefore, if that is so, if everything in the universe is based on a cycle, then the okayness-quality of things means to me, that the problems of life, do not comprise any circumstances, because we have them regardless of the situation. What I think it really comprises is the way we think of ourselves as separate from that tree, as illustrated earlier.
To say, therefore, that things will be okay means that there is some kind of continuation to the patterns taking place here and now that, despite our conditions and beliefs, will endure. As you see, this isn’t invoking some sort of deity that takes care of you.
It isn’t suggesting that there is some kind of being out there who looks after us. It’s only saying that by observing the behavior of nature, we can extrapolate this profundity, which gives us a clue that maybe life isn’t such a bad thing after all, but is the dancing patterns at the end of the branches.
Of course, one might still say that if we keep coming back to this horrific stage where we have all the aforementioned horrors, then it’s even worse than better. However, that is an attitude, not a reality. Because one of the many things that one can realize when they see their inseparability from nature is its myriad of relationships from a higher perspective. Sudden reminders of pleasant memories produce feelings of tremendous warmth and nostalgia.
I find it highly necessary from time to time to remind people of this “wishy-washy” sentimentality, especially in this day and age. Because almost everything in the media is reminding you how bad things are daily. So, all I’m doing is its opposite, of pointing to a possibility that maybe, just maybe, things will not be that ultimate tragedy in the end, but a comedy instead.
L.
