One of the challenges of growing older is dealing with the panic that comes with time’s passing. The days might be long, but the weeks are short. The years are merciless. The slip of vanishing days catches us in terror. We realize that this march of mortality is indifferent to our protest, oblivious to our pleas. Health and vitality fades; the mirror no longer flatters. People living through the middle passage begin to see signs of their inevitable demise: wrinkles on faces, sagging energy, aches and pains. There is news of illness among friends and family: blood-pressure, diabetes, cancer. Death has entered the house of rumination, and though it remains obscure, we can feel its chilly presence.
Terror in the knowledge of death is an ineluctable condition of living. As creatures of sentient intelligence, we register the certainty of death as a fact, but spend our lives fighting against its claim or struggling to actualize its import. Our default mode assumes that nothing will happen to us; we make coffee, pick up groceries, walk the dog, sort the recycling. The tasks that compose our days seem to render mortality irrelevant. Death is an abstract eventuality that has no purchase on the here and now. This default mode is a feature of our operating system, something necessary to to the function of daily life. It’s not that we believe ourselves immortal, it’s that mortality does not figure into our immediate experience. And yet, through the course of our lives, reality intervenes and we find our default modes rudely disrupted. We learn that our bodies age and falter. Like an insidious virus, the certainty of death finds its way into our programming, seeping into the spaces in our psyche where innocence and ignorance once flourished. An injury, an illness, an accident, and the assumptions we took for granted are shattered. The passage of time unsettles the functional illusions that keep death at a distance. Sooner than later, anxiety around death begins corrode our interiority.
In the clutch of mortality, some people compensate for their helplessness by obtaining status and asserting their power. Power can take the form of character armour that projects dominance and authority. To preside over others confers a feeling of oneself as the seat of influence, a position that countervails powerlessness in the face of death. However, this gambit rests on shaky ground: power over others generates the illusion of one’s might. This power must always find an external subjects, the targets of one’s influence. Dependent on external subjects, the craving for power requires an audience; It needs conditions whereby other people are always falling short, treacherous, inept, ignorant, and odious. Only in a world so flawed is the will to power justified. Sadly, the outward projection of power, and its ongoing campaign of control, does little to placate one’s fear of death, which springs from within. The fulmination of power creates a smoke that is mistaken for solidity; one confuses control over others with the mastery of one’s fate.
Others apply themselves to the gratification of pleasure. Here, the inescapability of death – an oblivion that occludes all experience – becomes a license to indulge. If I will one day vanish, then I must fill my remaining days with pleasures of every kind. Get it while it lasts. Many people hold this conviction to some degree. The will to indulge is usually held in check by social norms, and most people do not lapse into extremes. However, even in moderation people seldom realize that their pursuit of pleasures stem from anxiety, that their quest for gratification manifests the distress of mortality. Incessant acquisition of materials, voracious consumption of food, indulgence in sex, each suggest a panic-stricken state wherein sensory stimulation attempts to placate the terrifying void; the greater the void, the greater the onus on sensory stimuli to null the anxiety. Since sensory pleasures are fleeting, gratification never leads to full satiation. People frantically buy, eat, and drink their way out of the grip of mortality, but the spectre of death never subsides.
Alfred Adler posited that a maladaptive character armour stems from a feeling of inadequacy, a helplessness that compels a compensatory effort toward superiority. Nothing renders a human being more helpless than death, a fate that remains absolute. Vexatious effort is the purview of a creature confined to finitude. Soren Kierkegaard argued that dread is the condition of creatures who must ponder their mortality. Our devices for avoidance, distraction and pretence merely intensify our confusion. The only way forward is to face our dread, to live “unprotected by armour, exposed to [our] aloneness and helpless, to constant anxiety.” We must stand naked in the light of our mortality. When finite creatures face the totality of death, their finitude meets the absolute. The disjuncture feels like terror. However, Kierkegaard argues that faith is the bridge that binds the finite and the infinite. According to Ernest Becker’s interpretation of Kierkegaard, faith means that “despite one’s true insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force.” (Becker, 90). Faith is what allows me to stand defenceless in the face of mortality.
Unfortunately, in a secular society there is no longer belief in an eternal and infinite scheme of things, much less belief in some creative force. Our fears do not find solace in a cosmic order, for there is no order to speak of. Secularism has left us bereft of the faith that Kierkegaard so cherished. Still, I venture to say that even without belief in any “eternal and infinite scheme of things,” the possibility of faith remains. This is faith without object. We step forward into the terror and resolve to remain there, trusting that we will not wither, though we may one day perish. Pema Chodron writes: “To be alive and fully awake is to be continuously thrown out of the the nest.” There is nothing to hold onto. Faith is the trust that allows us to relinquish our white-knuckle grip, to soften into the prospect of death, and there to touch our vulnerability and deepen our humanity. Faith can persist even if we don’t have faith in something. The challenge of maturity lies in learning to trust, to soften into the uncertainty of life and move forward, however trepidatiously, despite the absence of guarantees. The will to keep going, to keep trusting in the movement itself, is the essence of faith.