Questions and Answers | Teen Ink

Questions and Answers

September 20, 2017
By devils_advocate PLATINUM, Spring, Texas
devils_advocate PLATINUM, Spring, Texas
48 articles 3 photos 7 comments

Favorite Quote:
Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional.
-Haruki Murakami


The human spirit is a magnificent device of the mind and body to create emotions: good and bad. I once thought that my spirit was out to get me, but now I know that my inner demons, not my spirit, were infusing my mind and body with something unnatural; something fiercely monstrous and inhumane.

What is it that creates emotion? What inspires us to be whole or broken? And what is it about loneliness that drives us insane, like wild dogs? I don’t know. You probably don’t either.


So let’s start again at the beginning: “the human spirit is a magnificent device of the mind and body to create emotions: good and bad.” But what makes up our heart when it sinks down into our lower chest or up into our throats? and what breeches the mind to make it incapable of feeling anything for a while?


In other words… what does it mean to be broken? What makes us so incapable of feeling anything that some days, we can’t feel anything at all? or are our brains just making it all up to fill the empty spaces with hope?
Because that’s what the brain does. When one runs out of hope, one becomes stagnant in the waters of death. We become the un-living: we are stuck between the passage of life and death.


So let me take you back to the part I didn’t repeat: “I once thought that my spirit was out to get me, but now I know that my inner demons, not my spirit, were infusing my mind and body with something unnatural; something fiercely monstrous and inhumane.”


...are we the demons?
...are we the monsters that infuse our bodies and minds?
...are we wrong? Is that even the final question?


The human spirit is lively, but can be broken. It can be stressed, like a wrist or an ankle. It can be fractured; it can be shattered. It can be weakened, but not for long. It bounces back, more often than not.


But sometimes I think that suicides are the janitors to the gates of understanding life itself, making sure that the way is clear for the philosophers who set out to comprehend the meaning of humanity. Because aren’t we all just born to die?


Enough depressing questions. What if life is, in fact, meant to be treasured? then our spirit must be wholly and whole in order to live the life of treasure. But what if our spirits are fractured, or broken, or stressed, or shattered, or weakened? What happens then? I don’t know. I suppose you don’t either, which is why I’m going to tell you.


The answer to life is not forty-two. But I’ll tell you what is: what if we were all put into an empty square room and were asked to identify which side was front and back? I’ll bet half of the people would say that their side was the front and the other side was the back. The other half would say that their side was the back and the other side was the front.


I’m going to tell you right now that none of them would be correct, but none of them would be incorrect, because we don’t know which side of an empty room would be the front or the back. We are all wrong, but at the same time, we are all right.


It’s the same with the answer to life. No answer is right, but no answer is wrong. And I’ll go ahead and make the assumption that I am wrong about the answer to life too, but I am correct in the fact that everyone is incorrect. That’s for certain.


So I guess there’s infinity sides to anything; all real numbers. And if you put life in numbers, I’ll bet 99.9% of us would consider me wrong about everything.


But I can tell you what life isn’t about: being right or wrong. So many of us are so wrapped up in our little heads that we can’t comprehend other people when they say they are right and you are wrong.


But what if none of us are right? Humanity made its own rules, didn’t it? With the exception of some facts, like the Pythagorean Theorem and Murphy’s Law, we completely and totally made up our own rules. And more half of the world doesn’t even abide by our rules. So are we really correct when we say we are correct? Are we really incorrect when we say we are?
Are we even here?
Are we even alive?
Do we really think and exist and breathe and be broken and fractured and shattered and-

Are we all just unanswered questions?

Because the human spirit is a magnificent device of the mind and body to create emotions: good and bad. I once thought that my spirit was out to get me, but now I know that my inner demons, not my spirit, were infusing my mind and body with something unnatural; something fiercely monstrous and inhumane.


But now I have concluded, in the span of the time it took me to write this all down, that we are more than just our spirits, or our minds, or our bodies. We are more than our beliefs and what makes us human. Every bit of the universe is inside of us, and every bit of us is in the universe. We are all just satellites, little unanswered questions in the span of 78.1 years, and we are all just quarks in this bigger spectrum we call life.



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