On Living

On Living

This piece is dedicated to you, the reader, because you’re alive. You get to share in the joy of this timeline with me. That was not entirely by fate; that was by choice. Thank you, eternally, for choosing life. If you keep reading, I’ll keep writing reasons for you to live. This is also dedicated to all the great minds of the past, who aren’t able to share in the experience of life with me today. From friends and family, all the way to scholars and the timeless legends of music, art, science, and math. Had you all not paved the way for the rest of us, we might have been lost forever. You gave me a reason to live. To those still here, and those who came before: you are, all of you, my reason.

Before we begin. If you are reading this and the thought of leaving has its hand on your shoulder right now, I need you to hear me before you read another word.

Stay. Just for tonight. Just for the next hour, if that’s all you can promise.

You don’t need the words for it. You don’t have to explain what you’ve seen, or carry it by yourself. There are people awake at this very moment whose only purpose is to sit with you in it until the weight lifts a little. In the U.S., a line is open at every hour of every day: call or text 988 (the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or chat at 988lifeline.org. Or text HOME to 741741, and you’ll reach the Crisis Text Line. Wherever else you are, findahelpline.com can send you to someone close by.

This whole essay is only a longer way of saying what those numbers say faster: the world is better with you in it, and tomorrow is worth finding out about. I wrote it for you. Please stay long enough to read the rest.

I

What does it mean, to live?

To live well. Mindfulness is often the term used. Gratitude of life, from a different perspective. We have been given life; therefore we must make life beautiful for fellow man.

Why is it so difficult?

Because we’re always one word away from being able to explain to the next person why we’re happy. I’ve written about this before, in On Facing. Words have a way of getting away from us when we’re talking about something that excites us.¹

Sometimes, this makes existence incoherent. Not because the people around us don’t understand, but because the people around us have different versions of the same words. Different understandings of the same reality laid out before us.² What we call real is every one of those understandings stacked together, and where they don’t line up, the words don’t either.

The sheer weight of a dual existence can be overwhelming. Something else I’ve written about, in On Seeing, is the few who have descended into madness trying to explain what they’ve seen.³

To me, the dual existence is a gift. What I’ve seen of it I will always keep to myself, but what it gave me I mean to pass on to anyone who needs it. Do I know the greater power? That may be a question I never need to answer to anyone but myself.

There is peace, in solitude.

II

What does it mean to live happy?

Life has a terrible way of dragging us through the worst of it. Kicking us when we’re down. Even when we think it can’t get any worse, along comes anxiety, depression, PTSD, and any number of phobias that line our vision with thorns as we attempt to navigate our path.

Why would a designer, who is supposed to be cloaked in glory, subject us to the sheer torture of existence, the raw stuff existentialism is made of? Nihilism, atheism, theism: whatever ruler you want to put next to it, living is sometimes the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do.⁴

I’ve lost too many friends to things that don’t make sense to me. Years ago, in my own darkest stretch, I came close to becoming one of them. I survived, twice, and at the time I couldn’t have told you why. I had no language for any of it yet.⁵

Whatever clarity I have now did not come from those moments. It came from the years after them, from staying. It came from the quiet I built in prayer, in meditation, in the long discipline of sitting still and asking, and from the people, here and long gone, who kept giving me reasons to live. Years on, somewhere in that stillness, things grew clear.

If you’re in a stretch like that now, you don’t have to wait it out alone. The people behind the numbers at the start of this essay are there for exactly that.

The distance between that dark stretch and the understanding was decades wide. I spent them researching, reading, listening, waiting on an answer I wasn’t certain would ever arrive.

But I’d be remiss not to mention how rapidly life threw songs, poems, and signs my way, telling me to wait just a little bit longer. Something was coming. It was all going to make sense here soon.

Patience, in life, becomes the struggle. The veritable battle against time itself.

Spiritual warfare, and the vanquished and the victor are the same person.

III

How do we proceed?

One step at a time. Paying it forward, this gift I’ve been given: the ability to have grown quiet enough to find some clarity, for the first time in my life. It felt rare to me. Although I’m certain there are more like me out there, and I’m so excited to live my life on the off chance I get to meet them.

I’ve got this pipe dream of meeting Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, for instance. The opportunity to talk to another human who understands his own relativity gives me motivation to keep going.

Is it going to happen? Who knows.

But how am I going to find out what tomorrow brings, if I pull the plug today?

Pull the plug? Or plug into the stream?

Do me a favor.

Stay.

IV

We have much to talk about. I have much to say, and so do you. My ears are forever open, and my mind is forever a thought that yearns to help others.

As near as I can tell, that’s what living well is: coherence as a direction you keep turning toward, one day after another. Be happy, and help the next person find a reason to be happy, too.

Never stop asking questions. Never stop existing. Maybe someday, we won’t have to worry about mortality anymore. Until then, understand that you’re mortal, and start living like you woke up today.⁶ Heaven and hell are both already here, as ways of facing the day, and you can turn.

You have the rest of your life to figure out why you’re happy.

Spend those days making a memory worth staying for.

Notes

1. On Facing opens on the question of why you are happy and follows the answer back, one reason at a time, to the place where the reasons give out, which is also where the words give out. Johnson, On Facing.

2. Wittgenstein took up this worry to take it apart. Suppose, he says, that everyone has a box with something in it, which they call a beetle, and no one can look into anyone’s box but their own; then the thing in the box “has no place in the language-game at all.” What a word means lives in how people use it with one another, not in a private interior behind it. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§243–315, esp. §293. That it can still feel, in the middle of a conversation, as though each of us is holding a different word is this essay’s sense of things, and not his conclusion.

3. On Seeing imagines a person whose felt moments all lean the same way, a mind taking in every signal at once, time among them, and calls the strain “a load heavy enough to drive an ordinary person to madness”; such people, it proposes, come into alignment and lose it again almost at once, buckling under the weight or turning to prove it to others. Johnson, On Seeing.

4. The problem of suffering under a good designer is theodicy, and it is old and unresolved. The essay does not attempt an answer; it records the question as it is actually felt. The robe of glory is an echo of the psalmist: “thou art clothed with honour and majesty. Who coverest thyself with light as with a garment” (Psalm 104:1–2, KJV).

5. A note on this passage. The account here is the author’s own, offered in the belief that saying it plainly does more good than leaving it unsaid: a reader in the same place should know that someone came through. It describes no method, and it is not a model for anyone to follow. The numbers given at the start of this essay are there for whoever needs them tonight, and they remain the right first step.

6. Marcus Aurelius keeps coming back to the present: however long a life runs, the present is the only part of it anyone has to live. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, book 2, section 14. Heidegger makes the turn more starkly. Facing one’s own end, which he calls Being-towards-death, is what lets a life become its own, and he is careful to say that it does not mean seeking death. Heidegger, Being and Time. Hannah Arendt grounds hope in natality: each of us is born in order to begin something new. Arendt, Human Condition.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Harper & Row, 1962.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Facing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20603463.

Johnson, Jamison Todd. On Seeing. The On ——ing Series. Legible Traces, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20688697.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations: A New Translation. Translated by Gregory Hays. Modern Library, 2002.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Blackwell, 1953.

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