When a friend told me the rhetorical question “why so serious?” is basically his life motto these days, something in me flickered into darkness — then burst into flaming light ten times brighter than before. (That is, the serious part of me. What else?)
I wanted to write a thousand-word essay in response, arguing for a life of clarity and intention that leaves no room for things done just-for-the-heck-of-it, situations that refuse to be defined, thoughts that would never be concrete and practical, words that mean nothing and add nothing in any deep intellectual sense. I wanted to point out how greys must eventually be clarified into blacks or whites, no matter if there are twenty or fifty or a hundred shades of them. I wanted to prove that the approach of “why so serious” results in an anything-goes life, where trust and honor and excellence and nuance — especially in one’s work or craft, and interpersonal relationships — gets lost under the euphoric, vague blanket of “this is me, now and here.”
I sat with the premise of such a piece on my mind for a month-and-a half, playing around with different examples for supporting evidence and commentary (as I often tell my students to include in their op-eds argument essays), wondering how I could draw all the strings of thought into one condemning concrete conclusion.
And then…
I broke my own rules (yes, more than one) last week doing something with someone I had longed to do for some years but never had the guts nor the opportunity to ask for before.
That thing was a thing is a thing would be a thing, but I did not know more than that it was something — I still do not know what it meant, how much it should matter, what I should call it…
And thus I come to a strange realization about the living of “a serious life” that surprises me more than I care to admit.
It goes like this: You can be serious about the components of something without being serious about its whole. (And vice versa.) You could even be serious about some components and not others within the same thing.
If we take seriousness to mean how much something matters to you — what you would give up for it, what you would do for it, what value and place it holds in your mind and heart, how much it affects the textures of your mind and your decisions — then there both levels within a range of “how serious?” and also distinctions between which part(s) of something to be serious about.
Logically, this premise does not check out. At least not immediately nor smoothly.
In some ways, it even feels wrong on an objective level, as if by chopping up our seriousness and sprinkling it here and there with very few areas (if any) where we are totally and absolutely serious, we risk ending up with a wreck of a life spent dilly-dallying away all that is of worth.
(And maybe this perspective is wrong — after all, I am still in the process of discovery and testing for this thought. But it seems worth pursuing further. “The importance of being earnest” and all that, you know?)
Seriously, though, how can something both matter and not matter to you?
Perhaps like this:
- The person you are with matters more to you than the name you give to your relationship with them.
- The joy you gain from pursuing your craft matters more than the financial loss you also incur along the journey.
- You interact with people who run, climb, or drive alongside you; but compared to doing the thing, socialization takes a backseat.
In a sense, this is simple prioritization, a stacking of what you care about and thinking about how many of those you can fit into your days and in what order. But it is a little more complex than that.
Putting aside the question of whether you can choose to be serious about this thing but not that (I currently lean towards being able to adjust for most things but not all), this perspective opens up a door for us to explore what exactly makes us serious about this component and not that of something we are drawn to, giving us clarity as we figure out the costs of relationships and life decisions measured against the meaning and value of what they bring to us.
Then again, sometimes it is the unnecessary bits that add to the preciousness of what we are really after. It is just not the same to eat the sweetest heart of a big watermelon and throw the rest away as to have the watermelon be a lot smaller but containing only that sweet bit, you know?
It is the hike with a friend talking about nothing serious that somehow manages to become a favourite memory of the week. It is the sporadic tail-wagging at nothing and nobody when Rags and I laze around on the grass outside that makes me smile. It is the critical eye of a kindhearted art galley owner going over my chainmail work that makes me take my own craft more seriously.
Sometimes, somehow, the not-so-serious stuff makes things more meaningful. And when they start to mean more to us, we become more serious about them. Or they do not, and become even less serious and meaningful to us over time.
The point is not whether we should be more or less serious, I think.
It is more what you are serious about, for what reasons, and to what extent — and to leave some room in all our living for those in-betweens that need time to discover out their own seriousness within our lives.
Because, after all, nothing is serious. Things are not serious. We are the ones being serious about things.