The Audacity to Create in an Absurd World

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

For a month I’d been sick. Coughing, wheezing, struggling to breathe. Inhalers, steroids, and antibiotics. Finally, excruciating leg pain and a high heart rate landed me in the hospital. I could feel myself shaking, both from exhaustion and anxiety, as I approached the front desk of the emergency room.

Should I be here? Am I sick enough?

I explained my symptoms and was given a wristband, featuring a barcode that would be scanned every time I did a test or received medication throughout my stay there. I was directed to have my vitals taken right there in the waiting room by a man who never spoke to me.

The waiting room was pretty full, and my already high heart rate surged at the sound of a guttural cry of pain coming from one of the rooms. This wasn’t a yelp of someone poked with an IV needle—it was pure human suffering. I couldn’t help looking around at people with bashed heads, bandaged bloody wounds, someone who kept their head covered with a sweatshirt the entire time (although the moans of suffering indicated something was indeed very wrong). Many people looked miserable, as I probably did. In fact, most people were suffering in a way that couldn’t quite be outwardly discerned. And we were all waiting. Waiting, desperate for someone to help us. And the waiting is what kills us the fastest.

Because waiting is where the mind works. This is it right? I’m surely going to die. Or I’m going to find myself permanently disabled in some way.

I was called for an EKG. Little electrodes placed on my chest to collect the pattern of my heartbeat.

More waiting.

Then I was called into a room with a nurse who collected more vitals, blood, and a Covid test. She talked to me about my symptoms, and as she drew my blood she said, “When you learn about the human body, I don’t see how anyone can think there isn’t a God. It’s too miraculous.” I didn’t say that I wish he’d made it a little less complicated so that less could go wrong.

A pattern of waiting, being called for a test, and waiting some more resumed. And what the nurse said did linger in my mind. This was a moment when God as a concept made sense to me, especially throughout most of human history when we had less knowledge and understanding of the human body. How can it be endured? The pain of living, without believing there’s some respite at the end. Some reward.

It’s too absurd this world.

As I sat in that waiting room, for hours, my own body seeming to fail me, feeling like I didn’t have the energy to go on living anymore. Watching the room fill with people, injured, ill, and suffering, hearing the announcement that they don’t have enough beds, and everyone in the room is waiting for a bed to come available, I couldn’t stop myself from thinking: How do we survive? How do we go on living?

How have we built all this? Because by the time I found a bed and a doctor, anxiety had begun to turn into gratitude. Gratitude for the systems and structures we have in place to afford a society with doctors, nurses, hospitals, and medicine. All of the complex devices that told the doctors I wasn’t currently dying of a blood clot, fluid filled lungs, or sepsis. Even though I didn’t leave with any real answers other than my immune system was waging a war that it wasn’t exactly winning.

For the next week I remained on bed rest at home, my heart continuing to pound in my chest, only able to sleep and be shuttled to doctors and specialists. And every doctor visit bringing a renewed sense of gratitude for the medical professionals I was relying on to help me return to a state of living.

Because what I was experiencing wasn’t living. It was survival. I was missing everything in my life—playing with my daughter, taking her to school, cooking for my family, reading and writing. There was no energy for anything. Many tears were shed thinking I’d never get out of the state I was in.

In and out of all the doctors offices, I often thought How can there be anything else? How can we not spend all our time learning about the human body and trying to end the pain and suffering of disease and death? These are thoughts I find silly now, but in the moment I felt selfish that I wasn’t doing the same. Maybe it’s the science fiction writer in me that wants to imagine a post-disease world full of cyborg people. It seems there are many that accept the status quo better than me. But there’s good reason to desire a world in which every person has the health and vitality to live in it.

Respite did come, after a while. My heart rate began to go down. I was able to walk around and do a few more normal activities. I still felt pain and fatigue, but the battlefronts inside my body had changed, even if the war wasn’t over yet.

This morning I watched the sun rise. At the breakfast table with my daughter, the first time I’ve been able to get up with her and take her to school since all this happened, I watched the dark world become visible and colorful almost in the blink of an eye. The amber light making the blazing Autumn trees visible.

How beautiful the world is. How wonderful it is to be alive.

I wanted to create something.

How could I even have to nerve to think that after all I’ve been through? All my conjecture about the importance of science and medicine seemed to be forgotten as I drove my daughter to school and listened to music, so happy to be alive.

And this feeling intensified in my whole being, the thought, we need both.

Some of you might be thinking, “Yeah, what a divine lesson you learned. We need art too.” Slow claps.

I agree. Anyone strolling through the Louvre looks at the Mona Lisa and thinks, “Yes, we need art in this world.”

But what I felt wasn’t the simple logic that “Yes, we need the great works of art.”

What I felt was a deep, whole body love for all the creative expressions of mankind—that book that didn’t make the bestseller list, the illustration that only got a few likes on Instagram, the painting of a student, the song with only a hundred listens, the scribbles of my daughter just learning to use a crayon... these are the artifacts of life being lived.

What I felt was a love for everything DaVinci had to create before he could create the Mona Lisa.

What I felt was a love for every piece of art that didn’t win a contest, for every short story that never made it off someone’s hard drive, for every song that was a little too derivative.

Every single one of those creations is someone’s way of saying, “I’m alive. I’m here. Somehow I’m finding a way to do even just a little more than survive in this crazy world.”

No matter what role we have in society, doctors, nurses, engineers, lawyers, truck drivers, chefs, food servers, moms and dads... We all have ideas and creations inside of us waiting to see the light of day.

Suffering, pain, illness... it isn’t going to disappear anytime soon. But what do we do in spite of that?

The audacity to create something in this absurd world we live in—in this short life we have—is what makes us human. And it’s worth living for.