Back in 2020, I was a very different person. Between getting removed from Walmart parking lots to limited time stayed in hotels and parks due to regulation or simply not having the money, I wasn’t sleeping well. On one such occasion, I had woken up after only three hours of solid sleep and driven to my shift at Domino’s – but not before grabbing a Reign Energy drink. With 300 mg packed into this baby, surely it’ll wake me up!
I arrived at Domino’s, only 15 minutes late, this time. At the peak of Covid, Domino’s was so swamped, and only operating with a skeleton crew, so they overlooked my tardiness and occasional nap, fortunately. However, when I arrived, there was a rack full of deliveries, with one timed to arrive 5 minutes ago.
All 300 mg of the energy drink’s caffeine content pumping through my veins, my jittering, sleep-deprived fingers fumbled and struggled to slip an order with 5 pizza boxes into a bag designed to hold 4, and take-off to start my six-delivery run was off to a troubling start. I rushed out the door hastily, the timed order, now nearly 15 minutes late, stacked strategically at the top a stack of orders so high, I could not see directly in front of me and walked with this awkward goose-necked side step before plopping the bags on top of my 2005 Saturn Ion that cost $700, a vehicle the seller seemed relieved to be rid of more than anything else. The top two bags lurched forward on the stack, but having done this for 4 years at this point, and with nerves striking critical levels I quickly grabbed the bags and corrected them in a glitchy movement that appeared more like a shaky twitch than reflex, before opening my passenger door and stuffing them inside.
Struggling through rush-hour traffic, with my order now older than the maximum 15-minute grace period for timed deliveries, I grabbed an opening in a lane and took it before driving certainly over the speed limit to hit my left turn on time. The light was green, but I knew the duration of this light by heart – I had less than 5 seconds to get in the turning lane before it turned yellow, when suddenly, a red 2005 Dodge Neon swerved into my lane, forcing me to slam on my brakes. Through such repeated instances, my right arm instinctively acted like a quick seatbelt, stretching across all my pizza bags, narrowly avoiding a pizza catastrophe (seriously, in the pizza delivery industry, you will have a better time communicating to your boss that you were in an accident while texting and driving than you will telling him he needs to remake 12 pizzas and 5 orders of bread twists). By the time I regained some semblance of composure in the situation, the turning light had turned red, and I had to slip into the turning lane, and wait a full cycle. In my rage, I screamed inside my car at the compact red sedan that possibly already had forgotten that I exist, wondering how the world could even DO this to me at a time like this.
Then, in a moment that drove my mind straight through the barricade of sanity like it was made of crude papier-mache, I looked around. I thought of the hellish corners of this street where accidents pile up weekly at a minimum, where gunfire could be heard in the distance every other day, and realized, the world isn’t happening TO ME. The red sedan didn’t happen to ME, the housefire didn’t happen to ME. The world is just HAPPENING, and I am a wandering participant.
This was the first time the veneer of some semblance of order as mandated by divine rule escaped my burdened mind. This was the birth of the Chaos Sage.
System Error: Reprogram
Whenever I told people about my circumstances, religion was often quick to be injected into the conversation. “Have faith. God will deliver.” “God’s testing you.” Well, tell him to stop, I would think to myself. I am tired and I need sleep. Some of these well-intentioned souls would then press on, saying “God tests his strongest warriors the hardest.”
How silly. If your strongest warriors are so tired, how the hell are they supposed to fight for you? Who is this guy? He really didn’t seem to think this through.
My views unraveled bit-by-bit from a place of agnosticism to something a little more concrete. To lean on a divine purpose is dangerous. Waiting for your faith to pay off, you’ll miss opportunities in life. What if there is no one who has your interest in mind, who can intervene when you need him to?
What if it’s up to you?
Rewriting the narrative
To ascribe a divine purpose to every single event in the universe—to insist that everything is meant to teach you a lesson—is far more grim than just saying, “Well, shit happens.”
When you ascribe such meaning to life, that means you now hold in your hand a need to rationalize wars, famine, stillbirths, and acts of great violence for a ruling benevolent force for justice who decided he wanted it done.
You cannot rationalize the irrational. You cannot justify the unjustifiable. Often times, I hear people say, “Well, you don’t see the full picture. Maybe something better is coming down.”
The issue with that is, passively watching horrible things happen with the sloppy notion that it is the divine intention of something we don’t understand risks losing something far more precious: our agency. The fact is, there are problems now. Letting them grow while we stand by hoping for a divine emergency flotation device only makes us feel the fool in the end.
“Meaningless” does not mean “Pointless”
When we remove the idea of a shackled, prewritten divine purpose, it then allows us to define our own purpose, or to simply have none at all, and stop to watch the wind flow through the trees, the waves flow gently along the shore, and marvel at the world’s beauty. When you open the door, are you doing it to fulfill your role in a grand project? Well, maybe YOU are. As for me, I’m opening the door to go outside. Through calamity, destruction, and the dangers of an infinite universe full of rocks, debris, wild creatures, and weapons of war, the water still flows, the moon still glows in the night. The sun still rises and sets. There’s beauty waiting for me out there.
There is no purpose to it. It just happens. As the late Alan Watts-Senpai once said, “It’s all just a happening. The wind is happening windy, the sky is happening blue, the sun is happening shining.”
And then there’s you, just another happening. Burdenless and free. Now you get to decide. What is it you want to do?
Conclusion (with a bit of insight)
The world was here long before you, and it will be here long after. So the next time your caffeine-induced road rage is challenged by a red Dodge on the busy highway, stop and ask, “What purpose will it serve?” He’s already gone, after all. Maybe roll the window down, feel the wind happening in your face, and move on. And if you’re feeling really petty, maybe stop to think how upset he might be to realize his lousy driving didn’t break your joy.
